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Telephoto cameras on our phones are played out, right? After all, there’s one on the back of most big-name flagship phones, and we’ve been spoiled with 3x, 5x, and even 10x optical zooms for a while. You can even buy teleconverter kits for some phones to extend the zoom range even further. Equally, portrait modes are just as common and a feature we probably all take for granted.
The Google Pixel 11 Pro has done something special by combining these two features to create a fantastic camera mode that, if you haven’t already, you should go out and try. Here’s why.
The Pixel 11 Pro (and the Pixel 11 Pro XL) features a 48-megapixel telephoto camera that enables a 5x optical zoom. On its own, this isn’t especially noteworthy. The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has a 5x optical zoom, the Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max has a 4x optical zoom, and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra has a 4.3x optical zoom.
Google’s computational photography expertise has always made the Pixel series one for camera fans, and it has long worked on aspects of the portrait mode other brands prioritize less, such as its Real Tone technology to render natural skin tones. However, portrait modes are usually about taking photos of people, and edge recognition for things other than faces has historically been hit-or-miss.
Portrait modes can add a shallow depth of field to photos of things other than people, but manufacturers have often shied away from this ability, mostly due to edge recognition shortfalls.
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