One of the main selling points for Google’s Pixel phone lineup has always been the cameras, and the Pixel 6 looks to continue that tradition. camera has long been the main selling point of Google’s Pixel smartphones.
According to XDA Developers, which was provided with an internal, unreleased version of Google’s Camera app and additional camera details from an unnamed source, the Pixel 6’s camera upgrades will include manual white balance adjustment and a so-called magic eraser, which will hopefully bring the object removal tool I’ve been waiting for from Google since it announced it at I/O 2017.
With a bit of reverse engineering, it looks like XDA Developers figured out the camera specs for both the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. The camera band seen on the back may house a 50-megapixel camera for the primary lens and a 12-MP ultra-wide-angle camera. The Pixel 6 Pro will also have a rear 48-MP telephoto lens. In front, the Pro will have a 12-MP selfie cam and the Pixel 6 will have an 8-MP lens. Camera app code points to the Pro’s wide-angle selfie functionality, though no field-of-view details were listed.
The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro will presumably both support 4K video recording at 60 fps on their main camera lenses, with zoom up to 7x. XDA discovered that recording at a lower frame rate could enable zoom levels up to 20x.
The Pixel 6’s Camera app will also offer new editing abilities, like an automatic white balance feature that may adjust to the subject’s skin tone, likely building on the more inclusive computational photography algorithm the company described at Google I/O earlier this year. The camera’s reported “face deblur” feature will snap multiple photos to help fill in the data when faces get blurred.
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Back to that magic eraser tool: XDA found evidence of a feature code-named “swiss,” which seems to rely on Google’s custom-built, in-house Tensor chip to remove objects or people from a photo. There’s no information on this beyond a code name, but it sure made me stroke my invisible beard. Could this be the evolution of the fence-removal feature?
There are a host of other hinted-at features in the leaked Google Camera app code. Google might be revamping the way the “selfie light” pops up when you shoot a photo, and autofocus and exposure lock might get rebranded to “scene lock.” There’s evidence of a motion blur ability you could add after snapping a photo, and what appears to be a “baby mode,” which seems to work by adjusting the camera to automatically shoot when it sees a child crawl into the frame.
We’re intrigued by what XDA Developers dug up in the leaked code, though it’s possible not all of these features will prove real when the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro are finally announced. We’re getting closer to the official launch, but if you really can’t wait to see the Pixel 6, we hear you can pop by the Google store in New York City to catch a glimpse of Google’s next flagship through a window—if you’re into that kind of thing.
