Google teased a more advanced shooting mode at today’s event

Today, Google held its MadeByGoogle event where it announced its latest hardware including the updated Pixel Buds, Nest Home Mini, Pixelbook Go, and Pixel 4 smartphone.

The presentation covered Google’s approach to photography and how it manages to get lots of details while also suppressing highlights from clipping. The Pixel 4 does bring new features to photography including HDR+ in the viewfinder, dual exposure controls for photos, and the Pixel 4 can capture starry night. The presentation switches to talking about Night Sight at around 54:23.

However, there is one scenario that has always been almost impossible to shoot and that’s capture the details of a full moon while also capturing the landscape its illuminating. According to Professor Marc Levoy , the difference in exposure between the two is 19 f-stops.

Professor Levoy offered the following image and admitted that the Pixel 4 would not be able to properly capture such a scene. The moon is always overexposed in order to capture the details in the nightscape. He then reminded us that “Pixel is committed to making its camera better with software updates, so stay tuned on this one.” (57:35 in the livestream)

Professor Levoy seemed to tease a more advanced shooting mode for Pixels of the future, but the bit about software updates improving the cameras indirectly hinted that a software update could enable at least the Pixel 4 with the ability to capture a scene with drastically different exposures. We wonder if this means Google would introduce a new fully manual camera mode with AI-enabled long-exposure photography.

The Pixel 4 starts at $799 starts shipping in the US on October 22 and Europe on October 28. Check out all the new features of the Pixel 4 here, and check out the pricing and availability post here.