Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use (e.g. not in a review), give or take 100%, are of people. People move. Long exposures just lead to bad outcomes and blurred people.
I mean seriously search the net for Pixel 3 night mode. It's like the Suit Is Back. They're even using the same verbiage across them. And the uproarious nonsense about Google using AI to colourize is just...well a place like HN should just be chuckling at it.
Night Sight works perfectly fine on the Pixel 1.
> Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use (e.g. not in a review), give or take 100%, are of people. People move. Long exposures just lead to bad outcomes and blurred people.
I tested Night Sight with pictures of people and it also works fine in those cases. Even pictures takes with the front camera (without a tripod, etc.) look great.
Your Pixel 1 likely sets a ceiling on the exposure time. The results may be great to you, but I doubt they compare to a Pixel 3. And of course in all of these cases about these great photos, there are zero examples from any other devices. Just with and without on a Pixel device.
That's single frame long exposure, not many frames merged. And as you mention, unless you have a tripod or extremely good low light stabilization, in most cases you'll end up with a bad photo.
I would definitely like to see more with actual people in them, your point about humans moving is fair one, and I'd like to see how it handles them. That's where taking multiple shots and merging them vs a single super long shot would make a big difference, as you can smartly deblur things.