Google answers our prayers, adds 10x zoom button to Pixel 10 Pro camera app

Google’s Pixel Pro phones all have high-resolution 5x periscope cameras, enabling 10x shots at a lossless resolution. This capability makes these devices stand out among the best camera phones on the market. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t make it easy to quickly access this zoom level, as it doesn’t offer a 10x button in the camera app.

Fortunately, we discovered that the Pixel 10 Pro series now offers a 10x zoom button in the camera app viewfinder. This is a long-overdue addition, coming over six months after colleague Rita El-Khoury criticized this omission. Check out our image below from a demo unit at the Made By Google event.

Phones like the Pixel 7 Pro and newer Pro phones have 48MP 5x periscope cameras, and Google simply crops the center 12MP to produce a 10x shot. In other words, this is the furthest you can go with the periscope camera without resorting to hybrid zoom and other software-based techniques. This approach means you can often take good-quality 10x snaps in daytime conditions.

However, the lack of a 10x zoom button felt like a missed opportunity to showcase the phones’ long-range camera performance. Instead, Pixel owners had to resort to using the zoom slider, which I personally found extremely finicky and sensitive. Google’s zoom slider doesn’t snap to 10x, often landing on arbitrary figures like 10.5x or 9.8x. These arbitrary zoom ranges are generally worse than 10x, as they often require additional software tricks (e.g., super-resolution and image fusion) that can introduce undesirable artifacts.

Rita and I aren’t the only Pixel owners looking forward to a 10x zoom button, though. In a December 2024 poll, just over 70% of surveyed Android Authority readers said they wanted a 10x button in the Pixel Camera app. So this is clearly something many Pixel owners will be happy to see.