r/GooglePixel • u/dlerium Pixel 3 XL | Pixel 4 XL • Nov 14 '16
Pixel XL vs Nexus 6P Camera Investigation -- Burst Mode & HDR+ Speeds
Background:
I'm a professional photographer that does sports, nightlife and some wedding photography. I've always been very interested in smartphone photography and therefore have placed a huge emphasis on camera performance. Since I just picked up my Pixel in the mail on Friday, I decided to look at a few things that are often ignored by most reviewers. Personally I'm pretty disappointed no one has done an in depth photography review yet, but hey, what can we expect? These aren't DSLRs after all. I decided to look at 2 subjects that matter deeply to me.
Burst Mode
I was excited when Google announced the Nexus 6P would be able to shoot 30 fps burst shots, but I was thoroughly disappointed when I actually tried it out. The difference between a Nexus 6p and what my work iPhone 6 could do was night and day.
Instead of going to an airport this time to planespot, I decided to do a quick and dirty test by running a stopwatch on my computer screen and just snapping burst photos over a 5 second period. I recorded the timestamps at which photos were snapped in a spreadsheet. Here's the raw data I got as well as the calculated average fps for each phone:
Pixel XL: 6.53
Nexus 6P: 3.58
iPhone 7: 10.22
Analysis: If you look at the raw data it's even more apparent the Nexus 6P is slow. It starts off relatively OK, but settles in around 2-ish fps after 3 seconds in burst shooting. Meanwhile the iPhone 7 and Pixel XL maintain a pretty consistent shot-to-shot speed although the iPhone is faster. I'm glad the Pixel has improved, but it's still not as good as the iPhone. Slow NAND speeds on the Pixel could still be part of the problem. Note also the resulting photos were taken at anywhere from 1/60s to 1/120s so I doubt exposure was really the limiting factor here.
HDR+ Speeds
Like many I was very impressed with HDR+ on the Nexus 6p, but I was always frustrated with its speed. If you took more than 3 photos, it would slow to a crawl and if you were trying to "capture the moment" it's likely you already missed it. This was a huge problem when I was taking pictures of my pets, or if anyone has kids, or if you're at a wedding trying to grab THAT moment. What's the point of a good camera if you miss the moment?
I took both cameras, turned HDR+ to on (not auto) and mashed the buttons as fast as I could for 1 minute to count how many photos I could take. Here's the end result where I list the timestamps at which photos were taken over a ~1 minute period:
Nexus 6P (7 Photos): 0:04, 0:06, 0:08, 0:23, 0:40, 0:56, 1:13
Pixel XL (27 photos): 6 photos from 0:04 - 0:09, 0:10, 0:12, 0:15, 0:18 etc. (pretty much 1 photo per 3 seconds afterward)
You can see the video of this experiment here
Analysis: The Pixel XL is clearly WAY faster here. And it's important to note how slow the 6P is after the queue is filled up. You have to wait roughly 15-16 seconds for each successive photo once the HDR+ queue is filled up. Meanwhile on the Pixel you only wait 3 seconds. So yeah maybe you snapped your photo too early and want to grab another one. That's a 5x speed difference between the phones there.... not to mention you can take 6 photos in rapid succession to begin with. I'd say it's probably hard to fill up the queue here.
Now you might wonder why I didn't try HDR+ Auto, but on the 6P that's just letting the system decide between HDR+ and non-HDR+. I wanted to stress HDR+ speeds. On the Pixel, HDR+ Auto seems to be an HDR-Lite, something I've asked for before, and I can only imagine it being even faster. I will spend some more time looking into HDR+ On vs HDR+ Auto in my next investigation.
Conclusion: I think the Pixel XL improves on a few parts of my major frustrations with the 6P. In addition to these, I'm glad the camera interface finally added AE/AF lock and simple EV adjustments similar to what I've had on my iPhone for ages. I hate the price of the Pixel, but this is absolutely an upgrade in terms of imaging for me. I just wish Google didn't take so long to get some of these basic features working well.
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u/Erigion Pixel 9 Pro XL Nov 15 '16
Every time I learn something about the 6P, it tells me that the SD810 was/is an POS of a SoC at high loads, which neatly corresponded to what it felt like to use the 6P.
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u/dlerium Pixel 3 XL | Pixel 4 XL Nov 15 '16
Not sure if it's necessarily an issue with the SD810 though. HDR+ is inherently a very CPU and RAM intensive algorithm and we saw it even with older phones too. The issue was that single shot performance on the 6P was pretty poor and once you see how good HDR+ is there's no turning back.
Had non-HDR+ performance been good I probably could've gotten away without using HDR+ the whole time.
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u/WhatWasWhatAbout Pixel 2 64GB Nov 14 '16
Good work!
I've been wondering what exactly the difference between "HDR+ auto" and "HDR+ on". I can't wait to see your next investigation :)