Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Google has offered great camera zoom on its Pixel Pro phones for a while now, with the Pixel 7 Pro and later featuring a 48MP 5x periscope camera. You can even get great 10x zoom shots as these camera phones crop in to deliver a 12MP shot at lossless resolution.
Colleague Rita El-Khoury recently wrote an opinion piece bemoaning the lack of a 10x button in the Pixel camera app. We added a poll to that article asking readers whether they wished Google added this button, and the results speak for themselves.
Do you wish your Pixel camera app had a 10x zoom button?
This was a mega-popular poll, with over 7,700 votes tallied. Almost three-quarters of respondents said they wanted a 10x button in the Pixel Camera app. Quite a few reader comments supported this opinion.
“A 10x zoom button would be nice. I accidentally shot a 10x shot and was amazed at how good it looked,” explained reader raffr. “I was just zooming and stopped at 10 because I thought it looked good on the screen. The resulting picture was very nice.”
Despite being a dedicated pixel user since the original launch, I did not know that the current gen of pixels had zoom past 5x… Because that’s what the display shows you as options,” wrote reader 00000000. This suggests that Google definitely has some work to do when it comes to the zoom interface.
The overwhelming majority of surveyed readers want a 10x button in the Pixel Camera app viewfinder.
I’m a huge proponent of a 10x button in the Pixel Camera app viewfinder too. I’ve found that pinching to zoom or using the one-hand gesture (holding on 0.6x/1x/2x/5x) on my Pixel 7 Pro is a finicky experience as it’s far too easy to choose something like 9.9x. That’s because the slider doesn’t snap to 10x on this older flagship phone. I’ve also found that the slider denotes “10x” zoom when it’s actually on something like 10.3x as it’s just rounding down the shown zoom level.
It’s a real shame, as the whole point of specifically selecting 10x on a Pixel Pro phone is that it’s a cropped shot with minimal hybrid zoom processing (e.g., super-resolution, image fusion) and lossless resolution. Even brands like Samsung and vivo offer 10x buttons in the viewfinder.
Nevertheless, 16% of surveyed readers said they didn’t care about a 10x button in the Pixel Camera app viewfinder. These readers are presumably happy with the current zoom options or simply don’t use their phone cameras often enough to care in the first place. Finally, 8% of respondents said they didn’t want a 10x button and 4% said they didn’t have a Pixel.
