Google’s Pixel 5 flagship smartphone drops the telephoto camera its predecessor offered for capturing distant subjects and switches instead to an ultrawide angle alternative good for photographing groups of people and indoor scenes. The shift follows Apple’s iPhone 11, which last year added an ultrawide lens.

An ultrawide camera also is useful for video, which often crops the outer portions of the frame to help stabilize footage. The ultrawide camera complements a traditional main 12-megapixel camera on the Pixel 5’s back and a front-facing 8-megapixel selfie camera on the front. The Pixel 5 starts at $700, but the same camera hardware is also used on the new Pixel 4a with 5G network support, too.

“The ultrawide lens ensures you get it all,” said Pixel product manager Soniya Jobanputra.

Google led the way for low-light and nighttime photography with its Night Sight feature. Now it’s marrying that technology with its portrait mode, which blurs background details. “It allows subjects to stand out even in low light,” Jobanputra said.

Google revealed the camera details at a product launch event Wednesday for the Pixel 5, Chromecast video streaming device, Nest smart speaker and other products.

The cameras on Google’s Pixel phones carry outsized importance. Although Google’s phones haven’t dented the smartphone dominance of Samsung and Apple, they have raised expectations for what’s possible for tiny phone cameras. In particular, Google pioneered computational photography techniques that use software and other processing methods to squeeze better image quality out of tiny phone cameras.

Computational photography competition

Apple has caught up, though, in part by adopting a core Google computational photography method called HDR+, which combines several underexposed shots into one single frame. The approach helps capture shadow detail while preventing bright blue skies from being overexposed into whitewashed blandness. And Google has lost a key researcher to Adobe, Marc Levoy, who coined the term computational photography.

Now Google has a new version of HDR+. This time, instead of just the underexposed frames, it also includes brighter frames. That’s a more traditional approach called exposure bracketing, and Google says it’ll make photos more vivid.

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Also new for video clips is a feature called cinematic video that smooths horizontal panning.

Last, Google now not only brightens faces in portraits, but also lets you tweak the direction of this apparent illumination in its Google Photos software — including for older portrait photos you’ve already taken.

Goodbye, telephoto camera

Losing the telephoto lens might disappoint those who want to capture more distant subjects like mountains or who like the foreshortening effect that telephoto lenses have on portraits.

But there are some compensations. First, Google offers a technology called Super-Res Zoom that offers improvements over conventional digital zooming. Second, the spacious perspective of ultrawide cameras can be useful for landscape photography.

Apple has taken a different approach. Its iPhone Pro models include both ultrawide and telephoto cameras alongside the main one. And rival Android phones like Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra offer even more powerful optical zoom hardware.

The main camera in the Pixel 5 and 4G 5G phones has the same f1.7 aperture lens and 1.4-micron pixel size as the Pixel 4. The ultrawide camera has an f2.2 aperture and smaller 1-micron pixels. It’s got a 16-megapixel sensor, though it’s not clear yet whether final photos will use all 16 million of those pixels.

For video, the new Pixel phones will shoot 1080p video at up to 240 frames per second and 4K video up to 60fps.