The Pixel 4, Google's new phone, was the company's first phone to have dual cameras. And this second camera is a "telephoto lens", which allows us to take pictures from further away with a x2 zoom. Of course, through software we can do up to an 8x zoom. But thanks to a mod we can increase this zoom up to 16x. We will tell you.
Although the "optical" zoom is only 2x, Google uses Super Res Zoom, an algorithm that allows digital zooming with a very low quality loss, which allows us to take a decent photo up to 8x zoom, which is where they have decided to put the limit. But sometimes quality is not the most important thing, sometimes the most important thing is to document something. And in those situations, quality is not the most important thing.
Google Camera with 16x zoom
That is why the Android community has gotten down to business and the XDA Developers user cstark27, posted a google camera mod for all Pixels, including the Pixel 4 that allows us to force the maximum zoom up to 16x. And the truth is that the result is not bad (taking into account that we are forcing the zoom to double its capacity).
Installing it is easy since we do not need to be a user root since the package name is different from that of the camera app. We have to install the cstark27 camera module In any case, you can force the zoom even more and exceed 16x (up to 50x), but apart from the fact that the photos will possibly be useless, you will need to be root to do so.
If you want to force the zoom even more up to 50x you will have to flash the Magisk module that cstark27 also offers us and enter the following command in the terminal.
adb shell su -c "setprop persist.camera.maxzoom 51"
Examples of 16x zoom
So that you can see the quality we get in 16x we are going to give you some examples in 1x zoom, 8x zoom, 16x zoom. They are provided by the developer himself.
This photo that we see below would be the scene with the main camera with 1x zoom (that is, without any type of zoom),
The next photo is with the 8x zoom, that is, the maximum zoom that the Google Pixel allows on a regular basis.
And finally the photo with the 16x zoom that we can obtain in this mod.
The result is pretty decent. The letters can still be easily appreciated, so it will be useful for a documentary photo, to have information and even to try to see certain elements from a long distance.
What do you think of the Google Camera with zoom 16x? Would you install this mod or do you have enough with the 8x zoom?