The Google Pixel 5: A Mini-Review - Small Package, Small Value?
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 22, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Pixel 5
Camera - A Quick Recap
I’m skipping the camera comparisons for this piece as it’s out of the scope of the short-form review today (they are very time consuming!). We’ve included the Pixel 5 in low-light photography in recent reviews such as the iPhone 12 piece and we’ll be publishing a more extensive camera investigation article in the coming weeks as well as the upcoming Galaxy S21 article coming soon, so I’ll reserve myself to just posting camera samples and commentary of the Pixel 5 performance.
In daylight, where the Pixel 5 seems to perform better than its predecessors is seemingly in terms of colours and colour temperature. Whereas the Pixel 4 and previous iterations seemed to have had a tendency towards warmer colours, the Pixel 5 more often tends to get things in a more natural and correct colour – at least in my own subjective experience.
One area that’s still prevalent in the Pixel processing is that I feel that it doesn’t do as well in preserving highlights of textures, giving them a flatter look compared to what we’re now seeing from the processing of the likes of Apple and Samsung.
The ultra-wide-angle module on the Pixel 5 is a definitive great addition to the phone and really augments the capture experience of this generation of Pixel phones, addressing a much lacklustre aspect of Google’s devices last year. The optics of the UWA isn’t as great as some of other competitors, but decent enough.
What is weird about the UWA is that although Google advertises as employing a 16MP sensor, the actual pictures coming out are sampled down to 12.2MP, matching the resolution of the main sensor. I’m not sure what the rationale is here, and I’m generally never a fan of this matching of resolution across different sensors in a phone as it never actually ends up in good quality results.
In low-light scenarios, the Pixel 5 is a bit of a mixed bag by today’s standards. On one hand, Google’s Night Sight computational photography mode is excellent in terms of bringing out light in very dark situations, but on the other hand the camera processing here doesn’t seem to have changed much since the Pixel 3. Night Sight in this sense can be a two-edged sword – produces high quality low-light photos, but sometimes it overdoes it in terms of brightening a scene too much, it no longer being representative of the subject. Night Sight also has a particular tendency to grossly over-correct for colour-temperature, losing the actual ambience of a scene.
In scenarios where there’s very low light, Google’s aging camera hardware really cannot compete against the newer generation sensors from the competition, which by now have caught up or also even surpassed Google in computational photography.
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Jon Tseng - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
>It’s been a couple of months now since Google announced the Pixel 5 –>Unfortunately we didn’t quite get to a timely review of the device due to
>other important industry coverage.
lol Anandtech's "it'll be ready when its ready" approach to deadlines is one of the most endearing features of the site
On that note has an Ampere/RTX3080 review on up yet? Obviously a somewhat hypothetical purchase but would be int to hear the view..
erple2 - Saturday, January 23, 2021 - link
Interestingly, maybe Anandtech is right to not actually post a review of the effectively unavailable RTX 30x0 GPUs. They're not available to most people anyway. Maybe Anandtech has been silently protesting the "paper" launch of the next gen GPUs? :)MattMe - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
I've owned the original Pixel, Pixel 3 and now the Pixel 5.I really liked the approach to offering top tier devices in a smaller form factor when the original was released, and appreciated the vanilla Android experience. The cameras have been fantastic, in all scenarios, I have been honestly left astonished at what the camera can capture even in challenging lighting environments.
I dropped and broke the glass on my Pixel 3 otherwise would likely have kept it another year or so, but having had a look around I opted for the Pixel 5. One thing I noticed right away that I don't feel the charts here get across is the real world battery life. I'd consider myself a power user, but not particularly focused on heavy workloads (I don't often play games or run other demanding apps on my phone outside some image editing and music creation/production), but I have noticed 50% of my battery remaining at the end of the day quite often, whereas on my Pixel 3 (even when it was new) I would be needing to charge by the end of the day.
The screen is great, the cameras are still fantastic, the resin/plastic back feels comfortable and grippy, the size is perfect. I really have no qualms whatsoever.
My main reservation before purchasing was the CPU, I'd heard that it was a noticable downgrade to the Pixel 4 and even 3 but in reality I have not noticed this. I read reviews mentioning how you can see image processing completing when opening a picture immediately after snapping it, but I always saw that on my Pixel 3 too. If anything I feel this is quicker than the 3 over all, and I never felt CPU-bound with that device!
All this is to say, I agree with the review. :)
The price could be lower, compared to the 4a5g may not be great, but in comparison to the 4 last year as a 'flagship' I would say it is.
I'm much more pleased with the device than I expected and would happily recommend it.
MattMe - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
That was a long one, I think I'm surprised by how it feels like an upgrade over the Pixel 3, despite many reviews talking about how it's a downgrade. I'd rather pay less if the only trade off is the CPU, which appears to be the case for the 5.BedfordTim - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
The reason I have always ruled out Pixels is storage. For phone where one of the main selling points is photography, 128GB is not enough and expandable. I filled 160GB on my old Lumia 950.supdawgwtfd - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
I have a Pixel 3.Unlimited cloud storage ;)
Photos only now are limited on cloud storage Pixel devices.
iphonebestgamephone - Sunday, January 24, 2021 - link
Not everyone has unlimited data ;)tipoo - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
Hard to believe the GPU in this underperforms what was in my iPhone 7, 5 years ago. They went really low end with this chip. Now Android seems well enough tailored for low end hardware that you're not feeling it too much, but certainly with intensive apps and games you would.GC2:CS - Saturday, January 23, 2021 - link
But A10 took like 6 or 7 W at full load and throttle badly to 3.This sucks up one. You cannot directly compare those.
Spunjji - Monday, January 25, 2021 - link
I mean, you can - and you just did.This is more efficient but slower than a 5-year-old chip. It would be fair to expect something that is both more efficient and *at least* as fast, given the intervening progress with manufacturing processes. Qualcomm can definitely build such a GPU, but they're choosing not to. It's sad.