14 DAY TRIAL // When it announced the Pixel smartphones earlier this month, Google stated that the smartphones would come with the best camera on the market, as they received the highest score from DxOMark, a trusted industry standard.
However, some Pixel owners have taken to Reddit to express their discontent with a halo effect that appears in images taken by some of these smartphones. The effect isn’t present in all pictures taken with the rear camera on the Pixel handsets, though, as certain light conditions must be present.
The halo effect appears when a flashlight is used as a light source, as images posted to Reddit reveal. It seems that many Pixel owners have noticed such a flare effect in pictures captured with the 125GB Black Pixel XL.
Pixel owners would need to use HDR+ in order to enable the fix
Some say that the effect isn’t determined by a hardware flaw, but rather by the fact that the camera and the 2.5D glass panel are positioned relative to each other. Such lens flares do appear in all types of cameras under direct sunlight or other conditions, but the ones generated by Pixel phones seem to be a bit different.
A Google employee did confirm the issue on the Pixel User Community forum and stated that Google would start rolling out a fix in the coming weeks. The company is working on some algorithms that would recognize the halo effects and then subtract it from the image.
He also assured Pixel owners that there’s no point in seeking replacements because of this issue; all they would need to do is to use the HDR+ feature to enable the solution.
Google does use lots of software tricks to maximize camera performance on Pixel phones, including image stabilization for video and HDR+ for pictures. It’s quite impressive how the company is able to solve a hardware flaw using software tweaks.