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Google’s former camera chief isn’t a fan of high megapixel sensors
June 12, 2025
Many phone manufacturers are eager to stuffmore and more megapixelsinto their cameras, but don’t expectformer Google camera chief Marc Levoyto be thrilled with the concept. Therecent Adobe hiresat down withThe Vergefor an interview to explain his stances on cameras and apps, what the future of photography might be, and why he left Google.
Levoy isn’t a big fan of high megapixel cameras, as you might guess by the Pixel’s use of 12MP sensorsfor years. He’s not convinced it’s a good idea “due to the laws of physics” — the denser the megapixel count, the higher the signal-to-noise ratio. He was also skeptical of pixel binning, where a high-megapixel sensor combines multiple pixels to produce a lower-resolution shot. The approach makes it “harder” to de-mosaic the shot and can produce aliasing artifacts like “zippering,” the engineer said.
Accordingly, Levoy defended Google’s reluctance to change sensors since thePixel 3. He argued that the sensor business was “fairly mature,” and that improvements tended to be “incremental.” The company might not get much more out of constantly replacing sensors, in other words.
Read more:The best Android camera phones you can get
More lenses are “potentially” useful, he said, pointing to the telephoto lens on thePixel 4as well as depth sensors on other phones. However, he stressed that software was also important, and that the two had to work “hand in hand.”
As for why Levoy left Google? It was a matter of “diminishing returns,” he said. There was less progress on high dynamic range (HDR) and low light photography than in the past. At Adobe, the developer hopes his universal camera app will put more control over output in the hands of users.
In the wider industry, Levoy saw video as the “next battleground.” It’s harder to use software processing given the extra computational demands, and the engineer saw phone makers depending heavily on a range of hardware, including processors, graphics systems, digital signalling chips and machine learning components. You might see big strides forward that eliminate blown-out backgrounds and other video problems.
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