Zoom Enhance is finally rolling out to Google Pixel 8 Pro users, enabling you to take high-quality photos from a distance. While the brand first revealed the feature back in October 2023, it’s taken nearly a year for the much-anticipated launch to materialize.
Peyman Milanfar, Computational Imaging lead at Google Research, shared a thread on X to show off the new feature’s capabilities, and the results are very impressive. Essentially, Zoom Enhance allows you to improve the quality of any photo on one of the best Google Pixel phones, the Pixel 8 Pro, whether you zoomed in or not and regardless of whether it was shot on the device.
The new feature is currently exclusive to the Pixel 8 Pro, despite being built into Google Photos, but there’s no doubt it’ll be available on the new Pixel 9 Pro too. Zoom Enhance processes images on the device, and you can increase the resolution and clarity of any image, not just photos. For example, Milanfar used a low-res AI-generated image and upscaled it with Zoom Enhance.
As the name implies, it’s ideal for zoom shots, where you might want to get in closer than your camera allows. This feature can take your blurry, pixelated results and turn them into the kind of photo you might actually want to share. It’s a big win for the brand, boosting the Pixel 8 Pro’s zoom quality to the level of some of 2024’s best Android phones, like the Honor Magic 6 Pro and Xiaomi 14 Ultra, which are both capable of 50x zoom captures.
Since this feature is part of the Google Photos app and not the camera application, it’ll be interesting to see if it eventually becomes available on other handsets. Of course, from a sales standpoint, it makes sense for Google to keep it exclusive to its priciest models, but we’ll see what happens.