Opinion: I don’t want to pay $1,799 for worse photos

Earlier this week, Google announced a slate of new phones, including the Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro Fold. The latter is a folding phone that Google says has the “largest display on a phone” and is the “thinnest foldable available.” It has a price tag to match, too; it starts at $1,799 (or $49.97 a month for three years) and goes up to $1,919 for the 512 GB option.

It’d be reasonable to assume that you’ll be getting the best of the best since you’re paying hundreds of dollars more than Google’s other Pro-branded phones. But if you look closely, you’ll see that’s not the case at all, especially when it comes to the cameras. In fact, most of the Fold’s cameras are worse than those on the regular Pixel 9, which starts at $1,000 less.

Let’s break those differences down. Here’s a chart comparing the camera setups:

The differences between the rigid phones’ main cameras and the Fold’s seem relatively subtle based on specs, but those don’t tell the whole story. The Fold’s sensor is physically smaller; it has an area of 31mm², while the one on the other Pixel 9s is 72mm². As my colleague Dale Baskin calculated, the difference in area equates to the Fold’s light-gathering ability being cut down by roughly 1.3 stops compared to the standard models. Ouch.

The ultra-wide and telephoto cameras are also notably slower and lower-resolution compared to their counterparts on the Pro. No autofocus is also a significant loss for the front-facing camera, though it is relatively easy to use the main cameras for selfies with a folding phone.

One could argue that ordinary people aren’t going to scrutinize their phone pictures closely enough to notice the difference between the cameras. After all, the Fold has a ton of computational tricks it can use to make sure its photos look passible to most viewers, even when viewed on the phone’s large main screen. But I’d counter that the folks spending $1,800 on a phone aren’t most people – they’re enthusiasts, the type of people who will care that their phone has inferior specs (even if they may not even be able to tell the difference).

They may also be the kind to ask why their Pro 9 Fold is missing software features compared to the regular Pro 9; cinematic blur, action pan, dual exposure, and 8K upsampling are all omitted from the Fold’s spec sheet.

What makes the Pixel Fold’s weaker cameras even more of a bummer is that there are genuinely some useful photography features on the Fold. Having a cartoon character wave at your kids to get them to smile is something you can’t practically do with a regular-style phone (unless it has a mini screen on the back, which no phones from major manufacturers do). And being able to prop your phone up can be a huge advantage when taking a group photo or selfie. With a regular phone, you have to find something stable enough to hold it or AI yourself in later.

I wish my phone could do this while still keeping its superior cameras. Image: Google

Adding insult to injury, Google’s direct competitor, Samsung, hasn’t sacrificed camera quality as much on its Galaxy Z Fold 6. The Z Fold series has historically had inferior cameras to its candybar counterparts, but the ones found on this year’s model are pretty much as good as those on the S24+. (The S24 Ultra has better specs, but with a $1,299 starting price, it’s kind of in a slot above most “Pro” phones in the market.)

So why has Google saddled its most expensive phone with specs that don’t match the Pixel 8? Is it because the engineers simply didn’t think about it? Or maybe they copied and pasted the camera from the original Fold and forgot to change it?

Probably not. It’s more likely that it’s a trade-off enforced by physics. To state the obvious, the Pixel Fold’s cameras are on a phone that folds in half. That means there’s physically less space for them; the regular Pixel 9s are 7.6 mm (0.3 in) thick, whereas the halves of the Fold are 5.1 mm (0.2) thick. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold is, again, the thinnest foldable available in the US, and that doesn’t leave much room for cameras.

To be fair to Google, that thinness is almost certainly something people shopping for a foldable will appreciate. The more it feels like a regular smartphone in your pocket, the more magical it is to open it up and suddenly have a 204 mm (8 in) screen. The Galaxy Z Fold 6 (which has a smaller 193 mm or 7.6 in screen, by the way) is 19% thicker when closed – you’re going to feel that.

However, I know that if I got the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, I’d also feel a slight twinge of regret whenever I opened the camera app. And as someone who’s foldable-curious, I don’t want that to be the case. I could swallow the high price or the subpar cameras, but both at once makes it just too hard of a sell, no matter how justifiable both aspects are.