A rumor I was hoping to be true, but like so many other areas of the Pixel Pro experience, the 11 Pro might actually be worse than its predecessors.

Google has changed the camera sensors on the 11 Pro. They’re functionally VERY close to the kinds of sensors we had on 9 Pro and 10 Pro. With those changes come rumors though, and one interesting rumor was that Google might be improving the telephoto camera to include a lens that can physically focus closer to your subject.

It sounds funny at first, that you would want to use a ZOOM lens to take photos close up, but you get significantly better macro shots this way. Phones have used Ultra-Wide and Wide cameras for close up shots, but the way an image stretches from that wide angle lens, and the way more of your background is visible and in focus, makes wide angle macro less appealing.

Here’s an Ultra Wide macro from the Pixel 11 Pro:

Here’s a Tele Macro from the Vivo X300 Ultra:

I’m a close-up photo fanatic. Taking pictures of flowers and bugs is my zen hobby. This kind of feature is critically important to me. So much so that I purposely kept the Xiaomi 15 Ultra over the technically superior 17 Ultra, primarily because the macro performance was better on the 15 Ultra.

You can imagine, I was mightily curious what a Pixel might do with this kind of sensor and lens improvement.

Alas, twas not meant to be…

I lined up the Pixel 10 Pro and the 11 Pro, and measured the minimum focusing distances, and they’re virtually identical. I cant hold the tape measure and shoot a photo of the tape measure at the same time, so the photos here are NOT of my exact measurement between subject eye and camera housing.

Locking the Pixels to only use their telephoto cameras, and using the manual controls for focus, the Pixel 10 Pro focused near 33cm. The Pixel 11 Pro was a hair closer to 32cm. Of course this is only as precise as I can get using each cameras’ built in focus peaking, at the closest possible distance that Godzilla’s eye looks decently sharp. I’d honestly call this a wash, and my measuring fell into margin of error territory.

However, a funny thing happens when we change sensor size, but keep the lens focal length the same. The slightly larger sensor on the 11 Pro appears slightly wider in field of view.

This is similar to what we see with crop factor on mirrorless cameras with different sensor sizes. Using the same lens, a camera with a larger sensor will appear more “zoomed out” and a camera with a smaller sensor size will appear more “zoomed in”. It’s called “crop factor”, and I discuss some of these differences in my smartphone photography book (available on Kobo and Kindle).

The Pixel 11 Pro has a slightly larger telephoto sensor, but the lens doesn’t seem to be significantly changed, so while I was able to focus placing the phone a tiny bit closer to the subject, the difference in sensor size results in smaller representation of the subject as a percentage of the frame.

The Pixel 11 Pro will be a tiny bit better in lower light situations, but is actually a little poorer performer for close up shots because of this trick of magnification.

Now, you might be looking at these photos and be thinking they’re “fine for a phone”, and they are. That Godzilla is barely the size of my thumb!

They are “fine”. I personally want better than “fine” for a phone with such a high MSRP. I’m not comfortable with the idea that someone walking into a carrier store to finance “the iPhone of Android” would be paying for this hardware for three years if they haven’t jumped through all the hoops to “get a crazy sale” on a Pixel. I digress…

One reason I prefer Chinese Ultra phones, they really embraced this tele-macro feature.

The Vivo X300 Ultra has a significantly larger telephoto sensor, which results in a wider overall field of view compared to the telephoto reach of the Pixel 11 Pro. The Vivo equivalent focal length is around 85mm. The Pixel 11 Pro telephoto is around a 106mm equivalent.

However, the Vivo can focus at half the physical distance of the Pixel. The Vivo pushes close focus to 16cm compared to 32cm on the Pixel 11 Pro. The resulting close-up shot on the Vivo is noticeably better.

Now a little more math!

From here, something funny happens with sensor sizes.

The Vivo telephoto sensor is significantly bigger than the Pixel sensor. More surface area on the sensor to work with, shallower depth of field, larger pixels delivering better pixel level detail. The individual pixels on the Pixel Pro are roughly .8µm. The individual pixels on the Vivo are roughly .56µm.

We know .8 is obviously bigger than .56, but the Pixel Pro has a 50MP sensor, while the X300 Ultra has a 200MP sensor. I find the “full resolution” to be rather useless in the vast majority of shooting situations, so I typically bin it all down to a standard 12MP photo capture.

At a 12MP resolution, the Pixel 11 Pro delivers a 1.6µm pixel size, and the Vivo jumps to a 2.24µm pixel size. The Pixel takes the data from four little pixels to sum up one larger “pixel”. The Vivo takes the data from SIXTEEN little pixels to sum up one LARGER “pixel”.

[Compared to mirroless cameras, the Panasonic GH6 Micro FourThirds sensor sports 3µm pixels. That’s how close the telephoto sensors are on Chinese Ultras to competing with less expensive mirrorless cameras.]

The binned pixels on the Vivo are massive compared to the Pixel Pro.

From individual dots, expanded to the whole sensor, we’re talking a difference of roughly 40%. You can crop 40% of the resolution from a Vivo photo, and while you’ll have fewer actual pixels to work with, you will have matched the sensor SURFACE AREA of the Pixel Pro. That means a photo at roughly a 120mm equivalent on the Vivo should still be matching the sensor and optical capabilities of the Pixel 11 Pro at 105mm. Light moving through the lens is hitting the same AREA, even though that’s a significant digital crop for the Vivo.

This would be like taking an older full frame camera with a lower resolution, and comparing it to a newer full frame camera with a higher resolution. The higher resolution image will have more dots and data to work with, but the optical characteristics from the lens and sensor surface area should still be similar.

In lining up that exact kind of test in my office (native focal length on the Pixel Pro versus a crop to 105mm on the X300 Ultra), the Vivo is still capable of an ever so slightly shallower depth of field than the Pixel Pro. There’s very little difference in JPG detail quality between the two images.

Better hardware feeds better data to the processing software.

[If any tech reviewers are “glowing” over the macro performance at “5X ZOOM”, they have yet again fallen for the trick where the phone will auto-swap to the main sensor, and punch in a ridiculous 5X CROP of the main sensor, then try to up-res that image with some AI content fill to make up for the lack of real resolution.]

I wish ANY brand selling phones in the USA would step up their game. The Chinese Ultra phones are now roughly two generations ahead in terms of hardware, and “gooder software processing” can only close the gap so much. We don’t need MOAR AI. We need better hardware.

And thank you for coming to my tech talk.

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