Google Pixel camera consistently blurring out The North Face logo

https://old.reddit.com/r/pixel_phones/comments/1c98wpq/i_noticed_my_pixel_is_blurring_brand_namesmy_7/

by thecosmicfrog • 2 years ago

127 33 2 years ago

old.reddit.com

Found on Reddit (posted by u/NeillDrake) and thought HN would find it interesting.

cheald2• 2 years ago

It's an interesting observation, but I couldn't replicate this by taking a photo of a Google Images search for "north face logo", or with a photo of the reddit user's photo. Pixel 7, stock Camera app. The photo turns out as expected.

saurik• 2 years ago

I wouldn't expect this to be a very good test as I'd think the camera could easily tell the difference between taking a picture of a screen and taking a picture of a jacket.

krasin• 2 years ago

It's an interesting observation, but I couldn't replicate this by taking a photo of a Google Images search for "north face logo"

Low-level artifacts for screen photos are different, so whatever neural net messes things up here, acts differently.

cheald2• 2 years ago

Well, naturally, but neural nets are pretty good at feature extraction even in the presence of noise. I also just printed out his unblurred example at a scale approximating a real logo and took a photo of it. Came out just fine.

fullshark• 2 years ago

I didn’t think much either until I saw this photo he shared in the comments:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Seems to be more than a one off odd photo and an artifact of something the pixel does re: image processing.

mcint• 2 years ago

Well, two-off. https://old.reddit.com/r/pixel_phones/comments/1c98wpq/i_not...

https://preview.redd.it/f9d3rqpigrvc1.jpeg?width=1854&format...

https://preview.redd.it/0o75bbeogrvc1.jpeg?width=1584&format...

cjk24• 2 years ago

I had a Pixel 6A and 7A in the last couple of years, mostly as an experiment. The computational photography side of it was a complete mess, mutilating many photos from crazy levels of over-sharpening through to turning things into weird oil paintings. Absolutely hated both of them. I do have photos of myself with a North Face hat taken on them though and they came out fine!

Crawled back to an iPhone and paid through the nose in the end.

Edit: crop from the 6a: https://imgur.com/a/RO0UYev

jraph2• 2 years ago

Do those phones do this even on alternative photo apps?

danpalmer• 2 years ago

Much of the "smarts" is in the camera app itself, not in the OS support for the hardware, as far as I understand it, so no it shouldn't. That might be good or bad depending on your perspective.

Freak_NL• 2 years ago

Odd. My Pixel 6 is really quite a good camera. The stock app on GrapheneOS is great when you just want to take a quick photo, and OpenCamera is full featured and very useful when you want to tweak the settings and fiddle around with various options.

I never have anything weird.

cjk24• 2 years ago

Mine was so bad I bought a Nikon mirrorless. That was the Google default app though rather than anything open source backed.

lambdasquirrel• 2 years ago

The iPhone always messed up the colors of the PNW for me. It was one of the reasons why I finally took the leap and got an SLR style body before I moved there.

I have no issue using e.g. AI-assisted patch and heal tools in Photoshop and Lightroom. I have control over the use of the statistical priors there. But I don’t want the camera taking the pictures for me.

cjk24• 2 years ago

The iPhone tends to have a weird appraisal of white balance I have found so that might be the issue. If you shoot ProRaw (need a Pro suffixed device) you get a better copy of what hit the sensor than HEIC/JPEG.

But yeah DSLR/mirrorless if you want something accurate. Then again everyone just mutilates the thing in their own special way later in Lightroom...

lencastre• 2 years ago

What is PNW?

internetter• 2 years ago

I’ve had the same experience. Switched to the pixel 6, had it for a year, bought the iPhone 15 Pro. I make a hell of a lot less than a lot of the commenters here, so the decision to do so was incredibly costly. I made it, in part, because I take a lot of photos.

At its best, the Pixel produces phenomenal photos. At its worst, they are horrendous. The iPhone consistently does well. With the Pixel I was getting disgusting over-sharpening, to the point I would screenshot photos as a few seconds after taking them. If I didn't screenshot, I would watch in dismay as the post-processing ruined it. The lens flare was frequently awful — lines that swept across the entire image. When I complained, the community said I should leverage this flaw in an artistic way. The video was awful, and the microphone was noisy. A few of my photos have had inexplicable black squares. Occasionally the camera lagged or crashed. My iPhone camera has messed up, but not like the pixel does.

I don’t know why everyone seems to think it’s better. Maybe somehow mine was defective, but I could find posts to corroborate every issue I had.

cjk24• 2 years ago

I just bought an iPhone 15 Pro this afternoon and my wallet is rolling around in agony so I sympathise.

Similar experiences across the board. I did a very special once in a lifetime trip and it sort of ruined the memories a little.

I think the people who think it's better haven't used a good phone or camera for a while.

thefz• 2 years ago

Weird, last 3-4 phones I owned were Pixels, never ever had a single issue.

grecy• 2 years ago

It will be a crazy world when a company has to pay a camera manufacturer if they want their logo to be legible in any photos taken...

Surely there's a Black Mirror episode...

bravetraveler• 2 years ago

I recall one where people didn't have enough upvotes or something and were basically outcast, close enough?

Intralexical• 2 years ago

Community, MeowMeowBeanz?

userbinator• 2 years ago

Photos that have undergone such processing should not be admissable as evidence in court.

...and from an even more dystopian angle, although this may be a "bug", it shows just how easy it is for them to selectively change how things appear if they wanted to.

_boffin_• 2 years ago

https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/vi...

8organicbits• 2 years ago

It could be dismissed under Daubert. You'd need an expert witness to show that the camera in question does not provide evidence in a way that follows well established scientific methods, or doesn't have a known error rate. The judge is then the gate keeper and can choose if it's suitable. For a camera that applies a bunch of random hacks that the engineering team pulled out of thin air, it seems possible.

thih92• 2 years ago

Another user posts an example of numbers being blurred out[1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pixel_phones/comments/1c98wpq/i_not...

ehsankia• 2 years ago

On the other hand, another user tried on a black North Face coat and it didn't happen I wonder if the red is the connecting link between the two.

speedgoose• 2 years ago

Could it be a classic LED flicker in this case? Assuming the dashboard backlight is powered by LED lights.

thih92• 2 years ago

Someone suggested that[1], the commenter replied this wasn’t the case:

I know the effect of shutter speed, and it wasn't present at that moment, you can clearly see every other number segment, and one of the numbers at the clock, if you zoom enough its very visible that those numbers got wiped out by processing

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/pixel_phones/comments/1c98wpq/i_not...

user070223• 2 years ago

Wasn't able to replicate with a 4a I wonder whether it's realted to the case where North Face "defaced"[0] Wikipedia by changing photos in the site which shows their logo in order to boost brand awareness in google image search results

[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/05/29/lets-talk-ab...

Zigurd• 2 years ago

Clear as day. Taken moments ago: https://photos.app.goo.gl/kB7hnyFh5GymYEnC6

Camera version version 9.3.160.621982096.22

crzyman• 2 years ago

This reminds me of how Samsung got caught using AI to fake high quality pictures of the moon. Someone proved it by blurring an image of the moon, then taking a picture of the blurred image, and it came out with tons of detail.

Google Pixel camera consistently blurring out The North Face logo

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