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The Pixel 3’s Super Res Zoom feature looks nifty, but how does it work?
August 08, 2025
Announced as one of the marquee features of thePixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL’scameras, Super Res Zoom promises to clean up digital zoom in such a way that makes it stand toe-to-toe with optical zoom. How the feature works, however, is something we did not know untilGoogleexplained everything in a recentblog post.
Before we talk about Super Res Zoom, we should mention Rapid and Accurate Image Super-Resolution (RAISR). RAISR is a technique that uses the Pixel Visual Core to produce high-quality versions of low-resolution images. RAISR does that by magnifying straight edges and certain textures, but it cannot “recover natural high-resolution details.”
Super Res Zoom gets around that lack of detail and uses a technique called “drizzle,” which uses the minor movements of your hand shakes to capture multiple frames from slightly different positions. Even if you stand your Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL against a wall or on some sort of tripod, the camera shakes on its own to mimic those movements and capture the frames.
Thanks to improved algorithms, Google also minimized issues like excessive noise, ghosting, and motion blur. The end result are pictures that are “roughly competitive” with the optical zoom lenses on smartphones like theSamsung Galaxy Note 9,LG V40 ThinQ, and theHUAWEI Mate 20 Pro.
Google even gives several tips on how to get the most out of Super Res Zoom:
Super Res Zoom is certainly an impressivecamera featurethat compares favorably to regular digital zoom, which crops high-resolution images and upscales them. It is also a continuation of Google’s philosophy that software can make up significant ground where hardware is unavailable.
However, how much more impressive would something like Super Res Zoom be if there was a second lens on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL? That is not to discount Google’s accomplishments with its software, but there is only so much of the gap between software and hardware that the former can compensate for.
At least zoomed-in pictures will not look so much like watercolor paintings with Super Res Zoom.
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