My Pixel 10 Pro’s camera is too popular for its own good

It’s been almost ten years since Google launched the original Pixel, and while it isn’t as strong a draw as it once was, one of the reasons to buy a Pixel has always been its camera. It’s one of the reasons I bought a Pixel 10 Pro after spending years with Samsung’s disappointing cameras, and I couldn’t be happier with that decision. I’m not the only one who’s pleased to have this phone around. In the past six months, my Pixel has been stolen almost every day so that my wife could take a thousand photos of the cat. Thankfully, Pixels have a killer feature that makes having a family member abscond with your phone less annoying.

So, why is my Pixel being snatched out of my hand so often? Shutter lag, or the lack thereof. Shutter lag has been plaguing Samsung’s phones for years now, and that includes my Galaxy S23 Ultra and Z Fold 7 and my wife’s Galaxy Z Flip 6. It’s fine if you’re taking photos of landscapes with good lighting, but as soon as things get darker and you introduce moving objects, everything goes wrong fast. The Pixel suffers from no such issue, and it always delivers photos we’re happy with. Since we got our cat (Bandit) six months ago, we’ve taken almost 1,500 photos and videos of him, almost exclusively with the Pixel. The difference is so stark that my phone being taken away from my desk while I’m working is practically a daily occurrence, after which it is returned with another half a dozen photos of a furry, snoring lump.

Not content to leave me Pixel-less for a few minutes at a time, my 10 Pro has also been on day trips to concerts without me, where it was once again pressed into service as the primary camera for the day. My wife went to the concert with her best friend, who is both an avid photographer and an iPhone enthusiast. Before the opening act had finished their set, my 10 Pro had impressed said friend enough that her iPhone 16 Pro Max spent the rest of the night in a bag.

I’m not going to say these are wonderful, mind-blowing photos. Zoom in, and you’ll find noise and areas of the photos that are too soft. So, why have I included them? Because all of them were taken well beyond 10X zoom, so when you consider the dim concert lighting and the reliance on digital zoom, these photos are impressive, and more importantly, they’re good enough to evoke the memories of the night, which is the goal for photos like this.

Make the lighting conditions even more extreme, and the Pixel continues to impress. When we went to the annual light show in the park near our house, once again we started fighting for custody of my Pixel 10 Pro because we both wanted to take photos with it. A walk that should have been half an hour turned into an hour because we both wanted to stop and take photos with the Pixel. It was fun, something smartphone photography hadn’t been for me during the last few years of using Samsung phones.

Despite my attempts at humor that suggest otherwise, I don’t have a problem with my Pixel going on photographic adventures with my wife. It’s fun to see the creative and inventive ways she uses it that I wouldn’t have thought of. One of the things that had the potential to be annoying was my Google Photos library. I already have 50,380 photos stored on my Google Photos account, and muddying that with photos I didn’t take wasn’t something I was keen on. But this is a Pixel, and Google has a solution for that.

Android has supported multiple user accounts on smartphones since Android 5.0 Lollipop, something I nearly forgot about due to Samsung’s insistence on removing the feature from anything but its tablets. With the toggle to switch accounts while the phone is locked enabled, my wife can have her space on my Pixel, with all the photos and videos she captures syncing to her library, not mine. It’s a thoughtful feature that makes temporarily sharing your phone with a loved one easy instead of a hassle, and Samsung needs to stop removing it from its version of Android for smartphones.

Do you have a friend or family member that gets Pixel envy? Or do you use multiple user accounts for other reasons? If so, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.