The Pixel XL gets a big demerit in one area of exposure, though. When I shot while walking, sometimes the exposure would pulse darker with each footfall. This happened in several videos. The iPhone 7 Plus video, top, wasn't quite as sharp in this shot, but color was more natural than the Pixel XL's and its wider-aperture lens gave a nicer background blur. The iPhone generally selected more pleasing, warm tones. In good lighting conditions both cameras were reasonable, but I found the iPhone 7 Plus colors to be vibrant while still natural -- perhaps a result of the wider P3 color gamut it uses compared to the Pixel XL's more limited sRGB range of colors.

Sometimes skin tones with the Pixel XL video had a yellowish cast, I think of this as the "putty effect." Under warm-hued indoor light, the Pixel XL showed people as too orange, It could switch color settings rapidly, too, in one case switching back and forth distractingly between an orange and blue tint, Here the iPhone won, perhaps a result of its six-element lens design or better image processing technology that creates the video from the neon yellow + bug out bag design iphone case raw image-sensor data, The Pixel XL was usually adequate, but with videos of subjects like city skylines and nature landscapes, the edges on the iPhone were crisp without appearing over sharpened..

The Pixel XL was sharper taking slow-motion video, though. We shot at 240 frames per second, a speedup factor of 8 compared to regular video. Both the Pixel XL and iPhone 7 Plus can only shoot at 720p resolution, which is fine but not as sharp as full high-definition video at 1080p. Of course, if you want to zoom, the iPhone 7 Plus has dual cameras -- 28mm and 56mm equivalent focal lengths -- and the 2X setup is much better for portraits, kids who aren't in front of you, concerts and many other situations with distant subjects. But there's a big caveat: there's no optical image stabilization for the 56mm camera. Because of that, and a lens that doesn't let in as much light, the iPhone 7 Plus uses the wider-angle camera in dim conditions, making it just like a plain old single-camera iPhone 7.

Lens flare troubled both cameras when shooting toward the sun, The Pixel XL, left, showed a distracting ring but didn't wash out bright areas as much, Both cameras suffered from lens flare, neon yellow + bug out bag design iphone case the streaked and washed-out areas that result from shooting toward the sun or other bright light sources, The Pixel XL sometimes would produce a ring around the sun even when the sun was outside the frame -- the Pixel XL "halo effect" that Google hopes to ease with better processing at least in photos, The iPhone 7 Plus would wash out details nearer the sun and add a green ghost image of the sun diametrically across the frame from the sun, I was disappointed in both cameras, frankly, but the edge goes to the Pixel XL for better contrast and less haze when shooting directly toward the sun..

I enjoyed the Pixel XL's snappy autofocus, especially its ability to lock in more quickly on close-up subjects. It also did better locking focus during slo-mo shooting, where you're more likely to notice a longer wait. The Pixel XL produced brighter nighttime video, but it suffered dramatically from smeary noise-reduction artifacts. The iPhone 7 Plus, right, produced sharper results. I had high hopes for the Pixel XL, whose pixels are 60 percent larger than the iPhone 7 Plus' and therefore in principle are better able to shoot in dim conditions where photons are scarce. Instead, the iPhone gave the Pixel XL a drubbing. iPhone video suffered from the transient jittering of noise speckles, but the edges were sharp, and the noise was far less distracting than the Pixel's crude, smeary noise reduction. Both cameras struggled at times to catch focus, a common affliction in the dark.