I've had the same reaction, but with an HTC 10. I'm curious now what a side-by-side between the two would look. The 10 uses a really novel lens with OIS and HDR, whereas the Pixel has no OIS but uses fancy EIS.

I'm actually surprised how little love the 10 gets, considering the noise made around the hardware quality of the Pixel, and the fact that HTC made both. I guess people just like the Google brand or something.

I have the HTC 10 and it's easily the best phone I've ever used. The only thing I didn't like about it was the amount of software you need to disable before it's usable. Like all those HTC speciality apps you can't uninstall and who want to send your tracking data. It's not as bad as some other manufacturers, but definitely annoying after using OnePlus products.

Seems like the HTC 10 really isn't all that great.

"The real surprise from these tests isn’t the winners, though — it’s how bad the losers are. In some situations, the LG, HTC and Sony phones put out pictures that loom downright unusable, something I’d expect more from a 2013 Moto G than "

http://bgr.com/2016/12/14/iphone-7-camera-vs-google-pixel-ga...

Well that's just a reference to http://www.techradar.com/news/how-2016s-best-camera-phones-c...

It looks like they had smudges on the camera lens. I've taken much more challenging shots than that without the horrible blur they have. But smudge any smartphone lens with fingerprints and it will look like that. Hell, smudge a DSLR lens and it will look like that too.

They aren't negative about the Pixel but rather the idea that it was only software wizardry that was the cause of the camera quality improvement.

What about photos taken by the Windows Lumia phones by Nokia? I had a 920, when it was brand new I thought it took great pictures. It wasn't the 41MP camera and even that something about 'not real pixels' or multiplied pixels, can't remember.

The technology is fine (although nothing novel is shared in this article), the negativity is directed at the extreme big-noting tone of this marketing message for X.

> Surprised by Negative Tone of Comments

Welcome to Hackernews :)

Hackernews, where everything sucks and do you have numbers to back that up ?

Maybe when compared with iPhone or Nexus cameras.

Your anecdotal experience is not especially relevant to the conversation. It's great your friends think your phone is cool. Literally every person you ever meet in your entire life could tell you the pixel is awesome and that's still too small a sample size to be indicative of anything at all.

Not difficult to beat the iPhone camera.

Why does my iPhone 4S take better photos than my iPhone 7? Modern iPhones photos are smeary smudgy mess. Can always tell on Reddit or Facebook when an image has been taken with an iPhone.

Luckily using RAW mode helps, which means it's some lunatic software noise-reduction in newer versions of iOS that is the problem.

I honestly think that you might have a lemon. It has been my experience that iPhone 7 images are among the best in class (I can't comment on the quality of the Pixel's camera, but I've heard good things). I understand your grievance, but honestly it's impossible to posit that an iPhone 4 takes better pictures than an iPhone 7.

My iPhone 4 takes unbelievable macro pictures. I hate to say this, but better than my Canon 20D, with an L lens. I was thinking about buying a macro lens for Canon, but can't justify the it anymore.

Just macro in my world though. The dslr still takes better portraits, and nature shots.