Pixel 7 Pro Camera Review: Can you see in the dark? Google can with Nightsight Mode.

At last, smudgy noisy night photos are memories of the past.  The AI on Pixel 7 Pro does a very good job of making photos more crisp, clear, and sharp in low-light conditions or even straight up night time. For that you need to access the Night Sight Mode, swiping to right from the Camera button. What makes this mode different than the normal camera mode is that it takes a bunch of photos rapidly and stacks them together. The sort of equivalent feature on Iphone could be perhaps the HDR (high definition range) feature: In high-contrast situations, the phone takes several photos in rapid succession at different exposures and blends them together to bring more highlight and shadow detail to your photos. 

Pixel 7 Pro - Nightsight Mode

Let’s start out with a fairly easy test.  Mister Frog’s bed of snow picks up quite a bit of light.  So even though this is shot at night, there’s plenty for the Pixel to work with.  The trick here is to see how much detail will come through, and how will the textures and colors present?  In fact, even though there’s a ton of contrast between the white snow and the dark green frog, his skin tones really are quite flattering.  

We challenged this Night Sight Mode feature with some really difficult shots for most phone cameras.  We’re very confident in this camera’s ability to take a “standard” photo in the dark, so let’s stretch it a bit. 

Pixel 7 Pro - Nightsight Mode

Here, we took a self portrait in the hot tub. You’ve got steam coming out of it and we’re almost entirely backlit.  In case you’re curious how I hit the shutter, the magic word is “my Google Pixel 7 Pro watch” - more on that soon!

Pixel 7 Pro - Nightsight Mode

You might think it’s a beautiful photo - indeed it is. It’s because Pixel 7 Pro did a great job of brightening up our faces as much as possible, the background is super crisp and clear.  Despite the fog coming up trying to confuse the focus, it’s clear to enough to see our smiles. 

The thing I really love about this is that this is not a long exposure, which has long been the go-to for brightening up dark scenes.  Because the individual exposures are very quick, you can actually get movement without blur.  So the next test was capturing motion. 

Pixel 7 Pro - Nightsight Mode

We wanted to see if we could even catch drops of water moving without blur.  Pretty jazzed about the result here.  If the phone can achieve this, it can totally capture a resting frog in snow.   

What do you think of our test shots, can you think of any other scenarios that would be a great challenge for Night Sight Mode? 

Let me know in the comments because I always read them. Next up is Hidden in plain sight, one of the most popular Pixel features -  the AstroPhotography feature of the Night Sight Mode.  You may need a flashlight to find those like, subscribe, and notification buttons, but definitely do it, I’d love to see you for the next one. 

—> Watch this on Youtube by clicking HERE.