Google's Night Sight stacks up impressively against the iPhone XS Max camera -- though not in every case.
- Review backgrounder: I own both the Pixel 3 XL and iPhone XS Max. I compared the same scenes taken with the XL's Night Sight and the XS Max. Photos were taken with default settings as most consumers would take photos.
Night Sight is impressive technology but as Google acknowledges in a blog post (linked to below), some dark scenes are a challenge. Overall Google's on the right track, though.
And it isn't a total rout of the iPhone XS Max. Some of the iPhone's photos came out more realistically and with more detail in low-light conditions.
Here's a short version of how Google explains Night Sight:
Smartphone cameras that take a single picture begin to struggle at 30 lux. Phones that capture and merge several pictures (as HDR+ does) can do well down to 3 lux, but in dimmer scenes don’t perform well (more on that below), relying on using their flash. With Night Sight, our goal was to improve picture-taking in the regime between 3 lux and 0.3 lux, using a smartphone, a single shutter press, and no LED flash. To make this feature work well includes several key elements, the most important of which is to capture more photons.
Night Sight: Seeing in the Dark on Pixel Phones, Google AI Blog, November 14, 2018
This is a simple but stark comparison in a dark room with almost no light at night:
This (below) isn't as stark a comparison. And the iPhone XS Max had a more realistic rendering of the actual light conditions.
Again, this (below) seems to favor the Pixel 3 XL Night Sight but the iPhone XS Max actually rendered more detail and more realistic light conditions.
This photo (below) was taken in very dark conditions:
In shots like this (below) the iPhone tended to do better than the Pixel 3 XL:
Not dark but low light conditions (below).
