The Google Pixel C Review

Camera

A tablet's large display can make it one of the best viewfinders in the world. While many still see tablet cameras as a mostly pointless feature, they do see a great deal of use among certain subsets of tablet users. Like most tablets, the Pixel C sports an 8MP rear-facing camera sensor with 1.12 micron pixels and a 1/4" sensor format. To see the specifics of the Pixel C's cameras along with a comparison to the Nexus 9 check out the chart below.

As always, the first comparisons puts the Pixel C against other devices when taking photos during the day, followed by tests done in the dark, which ends up being heavily influenced by the quality of a tablet's ISP and photo processing.

The Pixel C doesn't perform very well in this test. It wouldn't surprise me if Tegra's ISP was still to blame, as was the case with the Nexus 9. Compared to the iPad Pro, which has essentially the same camera capabilities as the iPad Mini 4 and iPad Air 2, the image is quite disappointing. There are issues with autofocus on the Pixel C which cause problems with achieving a sharp image, along with color noise in the frame despite the photo being taken in the day at base ISO. While I think tablet cameras should only be used in a pinch, when you're selling one for $500 it's not acceptable to lag so far behind your competitor's $399 mini tablet. This is something Google and NVIDIA need to work on if Tegra SoCs are going to continue being used in Pixel and Nexus device

In this second scene the Pixel C was able to lock its AF, and as a result there are no issues with bluriness. Unfortunately, the color noise in the frame is still present and there's generally just less detail than the photos taken with the iPad cameras. Color noise is something that's very distracting, and the fact that Google is having problems eliminating it in the daytime is very concerning.

Moving on to the low light testing, we see that the Pixel C has an enormous amount of color noise across the entire frame. The Nexus 9 suffers from this as well, and it appears that the ISPs in Tegra X1 and K1 ISP struggle with doing things like hot pixel compensation in low light, as in the dark areas of the photo there are obvious bright speckles of pixel noise. In comparison we have the iPad Pro, which is essentially equal to the Air 2 and Mini 4 as far as image quality is concerned. It produces a much sharper image with very little color noise and relatively fine grained luma noise. The Pixel C simply isn't competitive here.

This next low light scene echoes the results of the previous one. The Pixel C lags behind the iPads as far as detail and noise is concerned.

The Pixel C can record 1080p video at 30fps. This is in line with most tablets on the market. Unfortunately, the video is encoded using the H.264 Baseline profile with a bitrate of 14Mbps. This is yet another Android device using a profile aimed at applications like encoding real time video for streaming and easy decoding for very low performance devices, and I continue to wait for a smartphone or tablet that will buck the trend and be competitive with what Apple is offering in this area. For comparison, the iPad Pro records 1080p30 video using the H.264 High profile at 17Mbps, and the difference in quality is noticeable to say the least. On top of that, the Pixel C's video ends up suffering from some processing issues, including contrast which is too high, which reduces the detail in dark areas.

I don't really use the cameras on tablets, but the Pixel C is another offering that just isn't remotely competitive with what you get on an iPad, or even on a tablet like the Galaxy Tab S2 which is on par with the iPads for still images, and still much better than the Pixel C for video recording. With this trend of poor image processing on Tegra devices Google may want to work with NVIDIA to improve that part of their SoCs, or adopt an external ISP to do processing, because the current solution just isn't working.