Key Facts

• The author, Jade Bryan Jardinico, took over 1,000 photos with the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL and discovered that waiting a short moment after switching focal lengths, such as from the main 1x lens to the 5x telephoto lens, can help achieve sharper images by allowing the software to fully focus.
• Physically tapping the subject on the screen to manually enforce the focal point can also help lock in crispness, especially for portrait photography, and is a useful technique to use in conjunction with the camera's granular zoom steps.
• Using fractional zoom levels, such as 4.5x or 4.9x, can result in less-than-ideal image quality because the camera digitally crops into the primary sensor, introducing grain and losing fine detail, especially in low-light environments.
• Shooting at the full 50 MP resolution on the main camera can be beneficial for portraits and landscape photography, offering better detail preservation and more room for cropping and post-edits, but it takes longer to process and uses more device storage.
• Enabling the "Rich color" toggle in the camera settings can boost vibrancy in photos by swapping from standard sRGB to a wider color gamut, giving a 20% boost in overall color richness, but requires a display or monitor capable of rendering that wider gamut to see the difference.