Google starts investigating poor quality/blurry Panoramas issue on Pixel 2

Google’s flagship Pixel 2 devices have been grabbing a lot of bad press for broken functionalities from day one, and problems don’t seem in a mood to bid adieu. Aside from the ones that the company is yet to fix, now Pixel 2 users are reporting issues related to quality of images taken from their units while in the Panorama mode.

For almost a month now, Pixel 2 (non-XL) users have been chiming – on the official Pixel help forum as well as Reddit – about lack of sharpness or over all poor image quality of pictures clicked in the Panorama mode, despite enabling high quality setting.

The images below are taken from the complainant’s Photos library. Although they haven’t explicitly tagged these images, but it’s quite clear that the second one doesn’t have any sharpness, and presumably this is the one they captured using their Pixel 2 (click on thumbnails to view enlarged versions):

In addition, the original complainant also clicked a couple of more images (shown below) – one with autofocus enabled (left one) and the other with focus manually set to infinity (right one). Clearly, the latter is quite blurry.

A Reddit user tried to explain the relation between these two use-cases:

And another user on the official Pixel forum referred to this Reddit discussion in their comment as well:

Of course, cameras on flagship phones are thoroughly tested, both by companies as well as reputed publications, so it’s least likely that Pixel 2 had this problem out of the box. On look out for more info on the matter, we stumbled upon another set of user comments on the same Reddit thread, suggesting it’s the November security update that might have introduced the problem.

For its part, Google has finally considered the problem worth an investigation, as company employee Orrin (who is also the Community manager at the official Pixel User Community) is now asking users to share bug reports.

I’ll be reaching out privately to collect some bug reports and other information

We hope Google will figure out the source cause and fix it sooner than later. We’ll keep updating all further developments, as and when they occur. So keep visiting this space.

NOTE: Just in case you aren’t aware, Panorama is basically photography technique usually used to capture horizontally elongated fields of view. It is also known as wide format photography.

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