The camera, of course, has always been a major focus of the Pixel series, and that’s no different with the Pixel 10 Pro. But while Pixel phones have always offered excellent cameras, this year, many of the camera features are AI-related rather than hardware-related. This has been a trend for a few years now, but the Pixel 10 Pro’s AI-based camera features represent one of the first times that you might be using AI for your photos without even knowing about it.
Before we get to that, let’s talk about the basics. The Pixel 10 Pro has a triple camera system with a 50-megapixel main camera, a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera with a 123-degree field of view, and a 48-megapixel periscope telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom. It’s a good, versatile camera system — and while you will get three cameras on the base Pixel 10, those built into the Pixel 10 Pro are better overall, thanks to their larger sensors. Of course, Pixel fans might notice that these are the same cameras built into the Pixel 9 Pro, and it is true that the camera system is built from the same hardware. But the camera is still going to be a little different due to the Tensor G5’s processing.
Indeed, the Pixel 10 Pro was able to capture bright, vibrant, and detailed shots the vast majority of the time. In good lighting conditions, images were colorful and vibrant. And while the colors produced by the Pixel 10 Pro were perhaps a little more saturated than those captured by the iPhone 16 Pro, that’s really more of a personal preference issue than anything else, and they still weren’t quite as saturated as images captured by the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Additionally, I found the HDR processing on the Pixel 10 Pro to be excellent, ensuring that the phone was able to get good detail in both darker shadows and brighter highlights than both the Galaxy S25 Ultra and the iPhone 16 Pro.
The device also did very well in low light conditions, capturing more detail than the Pixel 9 Pro, and producing crisper images that looked closer to real life. The finer detail was very apparent in textured environments, like areas with grass.
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Then there’s zoom photography, which we’ll kind of talk about in two different parts. At lower levels of zoom, like at 5x or so, the Pixel 10 Pro captured solid shots overall, getting good detail from most environments. I did find that the iPhone 16 Pro did a little better at these levels of zoom, with slightly more realistic textures and colors. 5x is the native zoom level for the telephoto cameras on the iPhone 16 Pro and Google Pixel 10 Pro, so at these levels, you won’t get much in the way of AI enhancement beyond basic image processing.
AI camera features
But, of course, processing zoom is one of the headline features of the Pixel 10 Pro. At higher levels of zoom, Google is using generative AI to enhance images. What that basically means is that after being processed, the image you see isn’t one that you actually captured at all. It’s a completely AI-generated image that uses the image you did capture to inform its output.
I’m not going to get philosophical about this in this review. You can decide for yourself whether or not you feel comfortable with treating these images as photos, but I will say the feature worked surprisingly well. This feature is one of the reasons that Google is able to offer up to 100x zoom on the Pixel 10 Pro, and I was pretty shocked with how well it worked.
Christian de Looper for BGR
Typically, at 100x zoom, images captured by smartphones are grainy, blobby messes. There are plenty of phones that can zoom to these levels, and while you won’t get anywhere near that level of zoom on an iPhone, you can get there on a device like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The images captured by the Pixel 10 Pro and processed by its Pro Res Zoom feature were much more detailed and natural-looking than those captured by the Galaxy device. There are some areas in which this feature struggles. At times, for example, it wasn’t able to figure out what text said and produced weird-looking characters. But I actually found that for the most part, it worked well, even if the end result wasn’t exactly true to what was in the scene in real life.
There are other AI-based features built into the camera on the Pixel 10 Pro, too. For example, there’s the new text-based editing tool that allows you to explain via natural language how you want the device to make edits. It worked pretty well, and it’s a feature that’s available on all Pixel 10 devices.
As a whole, the camera built into the Pixel 10 Pro is as good or better than any other phone in this price range. On average, images look excellent, offering good detail and great HDR processing. In day-to-day situations, I would say that the Pixel 10 Pro is about as good as the likes of the iPhone 16 Pro or Galaxy S25 Ultra. But it’s those edge cases, like extreme levels of zoom, where the Pixel 10 Pro outdoes the competition.
