Professional Pixel Art Software
Lauro Pericles
Turns out that photographing a solar eclipse with your smartphone is not that easy. In fact, figuring out a repeatable process without cauterizing your retinas is downright challenging. But I did it. I grabbed some of the best smartphones money can buy, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, Google Pixel 8 Pro, and the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, and prepared for 180 minutes of celestial excitement.
That last selection might turn a few heads. It is, after all, a now aging flagship Android phone that does not have the latest image processing or even the fastest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip found in the Galaxy S24 Ultra (the S23 Ultra has the Gen 2). However, one thing it has that none of my other flagship smartphones offer is a 10X optical zoom (not even the S24 Ultra has that).
Throughout this endeavor I committed to not using any enhancements, leaving the phones' zoom lenses to do their best work without digital magic. I never pinched and zoomed. I just pointed each phone at the eclipse and hit the shutter.
Except as soon as I did this, I realized it wasn't going to work. The sun naturally blows out the exposure on all the phones. It's not that I haven't taken pictures of the sun before. I've snapped quite a few with the iPhone and to get over the blowout, I tap the sun on screen and that speeds up the exposure to lower the light and bring out the sun's definition.
An eclipse wreaks havoc with a smartphone's exposure controls, and the more the moon occludes the sun, the sharper that light becomes. My solution was simple and likely one you've seen elsewhere. I took my Celestron eclipse glasses and carefully placed the film of one sunglass lens over each phone's zoom lens. If you ever have trouble identifying which camera is the zoom, just open the camera app, select the max optical zoom, and put your finger over each camera lens until you see your finger on the screen.
The solar sunglasses helped with cutting down the massive glare. After that, I tapped on the screen and adjusted the exposure until I could see the sun getting the Pac-man treatment from the moon. In most cases, the result was a very orange-looking sun.
There were some non-smartphone-related glitches, like cloud cover right before our peak totality (90% where I live) but I was more successful than I expected and the smartphones, for the most part, were up to the challenge.
You'll see some of my comparisons above and below (I've used the best from all the phones in the above shots) which I did not resize or enhance, other than cropping them where possible to show them side-by-side.
While the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro shoot at 12MP (the latter is binned from a 48MP sensor, meaning four pixels combined into each one), the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra's 10X zoom camera is only 10MP. I think those numbers do factor into the overall quality.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro matched the iPhone 15 Pro Max's 5x zoom and sometimes seemed sharper than either the iPhone or Galaxy S23 Ultra, but I also struggled the most with the Pixel 8 to capture a properly exposed shot. It was also the only phone that forced a long exposure after the peak 90% coverage. The good news is that some of those long exposures offered up the most atmosphere, managing to collect some of the cloud cover blocking my full view of the eclipse.
Things got more interesting with the iPhone 15 Pro Max and its 5x Tertrapism lens. The eclipse appears a little closer than on the Pixel 8 Pro, but also more vibrant. There are a handful of iPhone 15 Pro Max pictures where I can see the clouds and it's quite beautiful. As with all the phones, this image capture process was a bit hit-and-miss. Colors shifted from orange to almost black and white, and sticking the focus was a challenge. When I did manage to capture a decent photo, I was thrilled.
The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra's 10x optical zoom pulled me thrillingly close to the eclipse. It was certainly easier to get the exposure and focus right. At a glance, the S23's images are better but closer examination reveals significant graininess, so much so that some appear almost like paintings and rough canvas.
As I dug deeper into all the photos, I noted how each phone camera used ISO settings to manage the image capture and quality. The iPhone 15 Pro Max ranged from ISO50 (for ultra-bright situations and action shots) to ISO 800 (very slow light capture, and usually introduces a lot of grain). Naturally, those at the upper end of the spectrum are just as grainy as those from the Galaxy S23 Ultra, which ranges from as low as ISO 250 to 800.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro has the widest range from as low as ISO 16 to an astonishing ISO 1,536. It used that for a capture of the 90% eclipsed sun behind clouds. Aesthetically, it is one of the better shots.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max is a very close second, but only because it was easier to capture a decent shot. I also think that if it had a bigger optical zoom, the iPhone's powerful image processing might've outdone the year-old Galaxy.
Google Pixel Pro 8 has some great shots but also a lot of bad ones because I couldn't get it to lock in on the converging sun and moon. It also suffered the most when it came to exposure. Even so, I am impressed with the ISO range and the sharpness of some shots.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max and Google Pixel 8 Pro also deserve special mention for producing my two favorite shots. They're not the closest or clearest ones, but by capturing some of the clouds, they add an ethereal, atmospheric element.
If I live long enough to see another eclipse (there's one in the American Midwest in 2044), I'll look for special smartphone eclipse filters and give it another try. By then we could well have 200x optical zoom cameras with 1,000MP sensors.
If that seems anticlimactic, it's rather fitting, as it matches my own impressions of the Pixel 8 Pro. The Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 6 Pro were superb phones, offering solid all-round performance and great cameras. I awarded both handsets a coveted CNET Editors' Choice award.
As a result, I was excited for the Pixel 8 Pro and had high hopes for Google's next-generation handset. But having spent a long time with it, I'm left feeling underwhelmed. It's not that there's anything glaringly wrong with the phone (excluding some of the camera issues I found, which I'll explain later), it's that it doesn't especially stand out in any major way. Its battery life is average, the processor performance is only OK, and I prefer the design of the previous model.
Some of its major new features, including AI tools for creating wallpapers and editing photos, along with a new temperature scanner on the back of the phone, work well enough. But they don't bring enough to the table to stand out as killer new features.
One of the major points it has in its favor is Google's promise of seven years of software updates. That's a huge boost over Google's previous offering, and it's much longer than what most other Android manufacturers offer. It means the Pixel 8 Pro should still be going strong in 2030, and that longer life span could result in fewer phones ending up in landfill.
And after countless hours of hands-on testing, I'm confident Google's new flagship phone offers a solid all-round experience that covers most people's day-to-day needs. It'll handle your daily social media addictions with ease and take great photos of your kids in the park. And if you can find a proper use for that temperature sensor, then good on you for persevering more than I did.
Is it worth its $999 asking price? Overall, I'd say it just about justifies it, thanks to the long software support. Though it doesn't have the straight-line processor performance of its rivals, the Pixel 8 Pro is still a great phone that I enjoyed using.
In our early testing, we found strange issues with the camera, which exhibited odd artifacts, especially in high-contrast situations. Several of our initial test images showed bizarre-looking image noise and artifacts in the shadowy areas, along with extremely aggressive software smoothing on areas that should maintain detail.
CNET reporter Stephen Shankland unpacked many of the Pixel 8 Pro's issues and elaborated on what might be causing them. It essentially boils down to how the software tries to blend multiple image exposures together (and doesn't do a particularly neat job of it). Google pushed out an update to help with the issue, which has certainly helped but hasn't entirely resolved the problem.
And we've also seen numerous examples in which the Pixel 8 Pro performed extremely well, and I'll dive deeper into those in the camera section below. We tested it in daylight, at night, and against rivals including the iPhone 15 Pro and the older Pixel 7 Pro.
Other early issues, such as raw DNG image files that looked washed out when viewed in Adobe Lightroom, will be resolved with better support from Adobe. But our gripe with the 1 to 2 second delay when taking 50-megapixel images remains, as this is simply due to the processing required to create such large files.
Have our initial concerns been addressed? Mostly, yes. Though they aren't entirely resolved, bigger problems have been minimized to the point of being negligible. We're now happy to move on with the phone as we would with any other.
Physically, the Pixel 8 Pro resembles its predecessors, with a big camera bar across the back. The rear glass panel is now frosted, though, rather than glossy. It's not a significant design departure from last year's model, but it does give the phone a softer feel when you're holding it, while making it a little less prone to picking up fingerprints. I don't think the phone looks quite as premium or classy as a sage-and-gold Pixel 7 Pro -- at least not the plain black variant I've been testing, which, like most plain black phones, looks dull and forgettable. The blue version has more personality, with a bright and cheerful frosted-glass back and bluey-silver camera bar.
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