Pixel 4 shenanigans prove it's the photographer, not the camera

So you'd like to know a bunch about the next Google Pixel smartphone via some sort of Google Pixel 4 leak action, yes? Today's sorta your lucky day – depending on how you interpret the information that's been appearing this morning. The photo posted to Instagram by Google'd Director of Design Claude Zellweger was, he says, photographed on a Google Pixel 3a... but with 20x zoom.

Posting the photo with the commentary left by Zellweger resulted in blogs aplenty dropping hell-of-commentary. The Google Pixel 4, they said, probably had a brand new super amazing camera that was capable of capturing such a masterpiece!

A comment from Zellweger to Alberto Villarreal, Creative Lead at Google Hardware, suggested that this was a Pixel phone and that it was captured at 20x zoom. Most people reading this comment assumed that he meant he had a Pixel phone that, with the standard camera and the standard camera app, was somehow capable of zooming in at 20x, standard, optical, somehow by magic.

In reality, as suggested in a later comment, also by Zellweger, this was shot on a Pixel 3a. "Just to be clear: This show was taken with a Pixel 3a," said Zellweger. "Zooming + cropping did the trick. I love this phone!"

But wow, what a photo. Can you believe this photo was captured with a Google Pixel 3a? Sure, why not? Semantics aside, the ability to capture something like this with a camera on a phone that fits in your pocket is a testament to how far we've come in such a short time.

Remember what you were using to take photos back in 2009? I was still using a Sony CyberShot with the ability to capture 14.1-megapixel photos. If I was lucky, I could photograph something that stood still long enough to avoid blur. If I was LUCKY!

Have a peek at the timeline below for a bit more information on the Google Pixel 4, a smartphone that'll be released this October, 2019. The Pixel 3 was revealed on October 9, 2018. The Google Pixel 2 was revealed on October 4, 2017. It'd be a real shock if Google didn't reveal their Pixel 4 in the first week of October 2019.