Google Pixel 7 Professional’s digital camera has a deadly, actually dumb, completely avoidable flaw • TechCrunch

Quite a bit has been written about how unimaginable Google Pixel 7 Professional’s digital camera is. The digital camera itself will get no beef from me. Final week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Brian and I have been gawking in amazement at how nicely the 5x optical zoom lens does, for instance. We had loads of alternatives to distinction and examine. Throughout Disrupt, I used to be capturing with about $6,000 price of digital camera gear and as my recordsdata have been downloading from my mirrorless digital camera’s SD playing cards, I snapped this picture: 

Granted, my devoted Sony A7r3 with a 70-200 f/2.8 lens continues to be able to taking higher photographs; a large hunking piece of glass and a full-frame sensor is tough to beat:

However let’s be clear — for the needs of capturing footage for the online, in good gentle, the Pixel 7 Professional provides it a fairly severe run for its cash, at a fraction of the associated fee.

As quickly as I noticed the design of the Pixel 7 Professional (and, for that matter, the 7, which has the identical silly gaffe), nevertheless, I noticed a fairly fantastically silly design flaw. That lovely steel entrance surrounding the lenses does a fantastic job for advertising functions. If I level my Pixel 7 Professional at you, there’s no manner you’ll mistake it for an iPhone, a Pixel 6 or another digital camera available on the market. Properly completed, Google’s industrial designers, for creating an eminently recognizable cellphone. Little doubt, it’ll be a dialog starter for lots of oldsters. 

The issue with including any gentle or reflective surfaces, nevertheless, is that it turns into exponentially tougher to take photographs by way of reflective surfaces: home windows, primarily. As a photographer, I wouldn’t typically suggest that you simply shoot by way of glass, however let’s be trustworthy; generally we’re in a automotive, on a aircraft or in a constructing, and we would need to shoot a time-lapse or a photograph or two. It’s a fairly widespread use case for many pictures functions, which makes it all of the tougher to grok why Google went out of its method to make that have worse. 

I’ve quite a lot of pals who’ve vinyl cutters, and the answer is easy: a small strip of matte black vinyl protecting up the high-gloss reflective floor on the entrance of the cellphone. 

I is perhaps the one particular person on this planet who cares about this, so it feels foolish even to complain, however rattling it, Google Pixel is positioning itself as the very best digital camera cellphone on the market, and that is such a fantastically n00b mistake that I’m actually flabbergasted at how the {hardware} large might make such a dumb misstep, after getting it proper for therefore lengthy. 

I think about there’ll quickly be an aftermarket area of interest for stickers protecting up the chrome, and I hope Google doesn’t made a mistake this foolish once more sooner or later.