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Comment by ganitarashid | Hacker News Reader

As long as you manually control the exposure and exposure time, the same can be achieved with an iPhone camera. This is not specific to Pixel.

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They mention a couple of features that are not just "long exposure" in the post:

* Compensating for moving stars

* "Live viewfinder" during exposure

* Selectively darkening the sky

* Dark current compensation (though that is probably needed for all long-exposure photography...still, not a simple "more exposure" feature)

All easy software implementations. This is not a hardware story.

If they're so easy, why haven't Apple implemented them?

Or at least someone would have come up with an app already, had it been that easy.

Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean users are clamoring for it. I can think of hundreds of things that are easy that apple hasn’t done

It’s hardly a secret that innovation in smartphone cameras is mainly in software now. This software camera innovation is one of, or the, main area that phone manufacturers are competing on at the top end of the market, so characterising it as ‘easy’ seems strange.

I think the point of GP is that astrophotography as demonstrated here is mostly implementable in software. If Google wanted, they could very well produce an app for iPhone that does all of the above.

It seems they have some ML stuff in there for specific features, e.g. sky / land light balance and hot pixel removal (probably similar to how denoising for MC path tracing works).

Aside: randomly recognised Ryan Geiss in the credits, he did the Milkdrop plugin for Winamp back in the day, and also some cool tech demos for Nvidia...

There's no machine learning involved for hot pixel removal. The way I have heard it described is that hot pixels stay in the same place across multiple images. One of the processing steps is to figure out the location of the hot pixels by looking at multiple frames. Stars will shift slightly in between the longer exposures where as hot pixels will not.

The higher quality does seem specific to the Pixel though, comparison https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1187557180276445186

In that example the Pixel has a 6x longer exposure. While Pixels can currently get better night photos currently, it's simply because the software lets them take minutes-long exposures instead of seconds-long. From a hardware point of view I don't think there's an advantage.

Yep it’s just the settings, hardware is basically the same and can achieve the same result.

This is a marketing blog post.

If you ignore all the research and development into creating the software then sure every camera is the same.

Both the Pixel and iPhone have AMAZING camera hardware and software that is better than any others in their domain. It’s just that the two are roughly equal except for the exposure time used.

The point of the software is to allow longer exposure time while mitigating the issues that causes. It’s not “just” a longer exposure time.

Yeah, but I think the software differences required for 30 seconds vs 3 minutes is minimal. 30 seconds is still long enough to have to deal with all the issues that would come up with a 3 minute exposure.

Exactly

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