Gadgetory

so the Google pixel 3 you already know that it has the best camera that you can get on a smartphone today but when it shipped it didn't have one of the key features that Google was talking about it's called night sight it lets you take photos that normally would look like this and it turns them into photos that look like this you get photos that would be otherwise impossible now that sample photo was taken with an early leaked beta version of the night sight software but the official version is out now in an upgrade for pixel phone owners and I want to go out and take some more photos but before I do I know that my friend and colleague Vlad Sabbath has been testing it and I want him to give me a few pointers so let's talk to Vlad hey blad hello so can you just tell me how this thing actually works now how it works is you have the AC up plus system which makes the Google pixel camera of what it is nice site takes that and expands it over this period of a few seconds to get you more light in situations where you basically have almost none so that means up to 15 frames or up to 6 seconds but this is really complicated because Google combines a whole bunch of information so first of all when you meet to ring the lights around you usually have the static photo what Google does is motion metering so it actually takes into account the movement of the phone in your hand if there's any handshake takes to account the movement of the scene around it and then it does the usual static calculation of how much light is hittin the sensor right so the whole idea is you can take something like a long exposure like a 6 second exposure but Google segments it across frames I think recombines alright so it's getting dark I'm gonna head outside but before I do any tips any tricks things I should avoid whether I try this thing out yeah the main tip is to actually find genuinely dark areas so this mode is really designed for nights and dark scenes it would improve the quality of the photo when it has lighting sure but for you to be really blown away by it for you to get the most out of it fine nights actual night alright well we'll see we can find I mean we're in the city here but there's a lot of haze so I guess we'll see so the funny thing is the pixel camera is so good that even this light I'm in right now is almost too much to show off night sight but if I take a photo here and then I can go to a naval night sight and then take another photo the whole bottom of the photo is basically black but if I look at the results you could see that the night sight did pick up a bunch of the green that wasn't available there before but really what we need to do is go someplace way darker because we got to show this thing off so there's a ferry pulling in so we'll take a shot with a regular camera I'll go to night sight and it is moving but we'll try it anyway so I'll hold still and we can see in the night sight mode you get the foreground actually coming in you get the boat all nice and lit and then on the non night sight all that foreground is lost the boat looks fine and it's more than what my eye sees so this is like a little bit unnatural but it is like kind of interesting but it's able to pull that off and I actually prefer the shot quite a bit like that boat is moving but it managed to maintain some detail on it nonetheless alright it's the next day we're back in the studio I just want to show you a few more of the photos that we took because I mean look at these they're just filthy filthy filthy good I mean they're really good they're the kind of stuff you wouldn't ever be able to get otherwise also Vlad took a bunch of photos so let's take a look at what he got this he illustrates the basic use of Google's nice site you have very little light it's nowhere in the frame and as far as human I can tell all you really have are the outline of the bin and the bench with Nightside turned on you get so much more detail you get actual color of the leaves on the ground and on the trees and you actually have a usable photo so here's an example of a shot where Google's nice said it's not actually particularly good for it's a nice shot but it's really well lit and there's a moving object in the frame no matter how sophisticated google system is even with all the boats pool exposures and chopping things up into frames moving objects will get in these situations the only benefit in this show if you look really closely is the reduction of noise in the dog sections of the sky when I first reviewed the pixel 3 I was really worried that all of the features that Google is adding would turn out to just be gimmicks that I wouldn't use but that didn't really try to be the case I use them a lot now and I think that the same thing is gonna be the case with nitesite and I actually asked Vlad about that yesterday but as far as I'm concerned it's not a mode it's almost having an entire new camera in there I mean we've seen things like tick so the guys who do the camera benchmarks data an attachment for the iPhone which cost hundreds of dollars and it did basically the same thing the knife photography improved my photography Google's light side does that exact same thing but just does it free software I think that's exactly right this night mode thing it really is like having a weird extra single purpose camera in your pocket at all times you're not gonna use it every day but when you need it it's going to be there and it's gonna work way better than you expect and I think it's kind of amazing and what's most amazing to me is this is year three of the pixel and if they're pulling this off right now I cannot wait to see what they're gonna do with the main camera software next year everybody thank you so much for watching and I want to know if you had this mode on your phone what kind of pictures did you try and take with it what kind of stuff haven't you been able to get before let me know in the comments and then head over vert science because they have a dope video about supersonic air travel it might be coming back