Google India shows off Pixel 8 Pro's Super Res Zoom in latest #MrIndiaMeetsPixel ad

One of the main features of the Pixel 8 Pro is its powerful optical zoom capability, which can be even better thanks to the ‘Super Res Zoom’ technology that the company boasts in the latest Google India #MrIndiaMeetsPixel ad.

Google India’s latest #MrIndiaMeetsPixel ad shows a person looking to buy their dream home. Among the options, she went to visit one that promoted a room with a sea view, but when checking the room, there is actually a very long distance between the sea and the room. So, Mr. India magically appears with the Pixel 8 Pro and its ‘Super Res Zoom’ feature to save the day.

The ad points out that they are just simulating the feature, so it is possible that the quality will vary if you try something like this by yourself. However, Google Pixel phones have been praised for how well these types of options work, so you can still get high-quality zoom images in the real world.

‘Super Res Zoom’ is a feature that has been present on Pixel phones for quite a few years (since the Pixel 3 series onwards). It is designed to significantly improve the quality of photos with zoom, even when the device does not offer a dedicated telephoto or periscope lens.

The Pixel 8 Pro is a smartphone that includes a periscope lens with up to 5x optical zoom (lossless) capabilities, but ‘Super Res Zoom’ allows it to maintain decent image quality at up to 30x zoom.

On Pixel phones without a telephoto/periscope lens, ‘Super Res Zoom’ works by capturing multiple images at different zoom/crop levels, then combines them into a single image that will be processed by Google’s powerful machine learning algorithms, resulting in an enhanced final picture.

On Pixel phones with that dedicated lens (like the Pixel 8 Pro), the operation is similar, but instead of just using multiple digital crops of the main sensor, it also uses images taken with the optical zoom lens. This results in better max zoom capacity and image quality.

So, even Pixel devices without a dedicated zoom lens offer high-quality crops thanks to this technology. In the case of the vanilla Pixel 8, the maximum zoom is 8x, but the best quality is probably noticeable at the lowest levels (like 2x or 3x).