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Google Pixel 4a vs 3500$ PRO Canon Camera // Can a PHONE take better RAW photos than a DSLR in 2021?
The results are IMPRESSIVE! After publishing my comparison & reviewing the Google Pixel 4a, I wondered if its photos could beat my Canon 6D Mk II full-frame DSLR (or other mirrorless) when taking RAW pictures in 2021. With the main camera mode, HDR+, using computational photography (including photo stacking, AI scene detection, local tone mapping, etc.), I wanted to see if these AI techniques in phone cameras (Google Pixel, iPhone, Xiaomi) can actually compensate for the small sensor and lenses. I start by taking a few shots in the beautiful Mont-Tremblant ski resort before moving on to compare the shots in detail.
🔗 PART 1: Computational Photography vs DSLR https://youtu.be/4KY9rIr0ifE
🔗 📸 HIGH-RES & RAW PHOTOS: https://lbaphotographie.ca/google-pixel-4a-vs-canon-6d-mk-ii-raw-comparison
🔗 BUY THE GOOGLE PIXEL 4a (affiliate link): https://amzn.to/3o0B3DR
🔗 EDITING TUTORIALS https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6kUdfoIX4tzTqZ41_aJFU0XfyhN7r0gC
🔗 Google AI Blog: https://ai.googleblog.com/search/label/Computational%20Photography
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- Google Pixel 4a 🍂 Real World 🍂 Review: Still a photography beast in 2020? https://youtu.be/7wNDXsDKoCg
- HOW TO shoot STARS with a PHONE + Pixel 4a ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY mode review https://youtu.be/LwnMOsq0Mpk
- Taking pictures in the morning will elevate your photography to another level (landscape & travel) https://youtu.be/Rnkuiob3dCw
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:23 - Part 1 vs Part 2 of the comparison
00:57 - How RAW files are created on the Pixel 4a and DSLR
02:19 - Test 1: Dynamic Range
02:50 - Test 2: Overexposing the pictures
03:38 - Test 3: Underexposing the pictures
04:38 - Test 4: Dynamic Range & detail
05:09 - Test 5: Sunset
05:35 - Test 6: Low Light (Night)
07:11 - A few extra photos!
07:27 - Comparison: Intro
07:53 - Comparison: Recovering the exposure
10:03 - JPEG vs RAW: Editing example
11:24 - Why I always shoot in RAW!
12:35 - Comparison: Dynamic Range
14:18 - Comparison: Colors
15:45 - Comparison: Detail & Sharpening
16:04 - Comparison: Low Light & Night Photography
17:02 - Comparison: One thing a RAW file can't fix...
17:55 - Google Pixel 4a vs Canon 6D Mk II RAW: My thoughts?
19:06 - Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
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- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
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- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
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#googlepixel4a #teampixel #canon6dmkii
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:23 Part 1 vs Part 2 of the comparison
- 0:57 How RAW files are created on the Pixel 4a and DSLR
- 2:19 Test 1: Dynamic Range
- 2:50 Test 2: Overexposing the pictures
- 3:38 Test 3: Underexposing the pictures
- 4:38 Test 4: Dynamic Range & detail
- 5:09 Test 5: Sunset
- 5:35 Test 6: Low Light (Night)
- 7:11 A few extra photos!
- 7:27 Comparison: Intro
- 7:53 Comparison: Recovering the exposure
- 10:03 JPEG vs RAW: Editing example
- 11:24 Why I always shoot in RAW!
- 12:35 Comparison: Dynamic Range
- 14:18 Comparison: Colors
- 15:45 Comparison: Detail & Sharpening
- 16:04 Comparison: Low Light & Night Photography
- 17:02 Comparison: One thing a RAW file can't fix...
- 17:55 Google Pixel 4a vs Canon 6D Mk II RAW: My thoughts?
- 19:06 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
hello everyone welcome in the beautiful montreux vlog ski result this is the second part of my comparison of my google pixel 4a which is a 350 phone with my 3 500 canon 6d mark ii dslr [Music] for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahalford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this start in my last comparison video i focused on the computational photography of the google pixel 4a versus the default pictures we get with the canon 6d mark ii in this video i want to step up the game and talk about the raw files that we get on both cameras [Music] now let's start by talking about water rifles and how they're created i like digging the analogy of a cake to talk about them where the raw file is like if you have all your ingredients ready to create the cake and the gpeg is actually the kick that is fully baked afterwards where you don't have any possibility to change anything so with the raw ingredients you can still change the recipe if you want so it's the same thing with a picture the raw files are not created the same way depending on the camera so for example on my dslr they take the value of every single pixel on the sensor and they save that raw information inside of the file on my google pixel it's a little bit more fancy what they do to get better results where they take this information every single pixel on the sensor but they also take multiple pictures uh with the same exposure and then use a technique that is called averaging where they take the average value of every single pixel on the picture to create the final results and this allows to have a little bit more information in the parts of the pictures that are darker uh or in the parts where you have the highlights and you get rid of a lot of the noise when doing this technique because you get the irish value for every single shot instead of having only one pixel and the information from there so we're going to see if this actually helps getting the shot or not [Music] in this first threshold i want to test the dynamic range of the two raw files so in here we have the button that is pretty dark with the trees and then we have the white of the snow that is really bright so we're gonna see how much information both raw files can capture so let's take the shot [Music] okay so in this example i want to see how it's going to work if i ever expose the shots we have a lot of white here so it's a good example for this so i'm first going to take a normal shot with the good exposure on my camera here so i'm just going to go and grab it here take the same shot using my cell phone and have both shots now i'm going to come inside of my dslr and over expose it of by one stop i'm going to come back here take the shot and come on my google pixel phone right here and i'm gonna go on the screen here and bring up both sliders to have it overexposed to see if we can recover the detail afterwards so i'm gonna take the picture here and i'm going to see after order if it's possible to recover that information in the raw file for this next example i want to talk about how the google pixel 4 gets the pictures so when it stacks all the pictures together it actually reduces the exposure a little bit and by reducing the exposure they're sure to get the detail inside of the highlights of the picture and never blow the highlights because if you blow the highlights you cannot really recover them even if it's a raw file so in this example i want to set my camera also to lower the f-stop to make a test and see if it helps my dslr to use the same trick so let's take the picture just i'm just going to set up here the exposure and reduce it by one stop take the picture here of the chairs in the fog here we go and i'm gonna try to get the same shot here [Music] for the last comparison shot here we have a pretty complex scene with the snow in the background and all the detail inside of the decoration in front so we're going to come here with the gold pixel for it we're going to stop the first shot here i'm just going to put it away and go for the second shot with the dslr and here we have our two shots and ready to compare them [Music] we're now done with our ski day we're gonna head back home and i'm gonna take a few pictures at night to see how it performs in harsher conditions [Music] i just took a few pictures of the sunset that is behind me here they're not the best sensitive shots but they should be pretty good examples of how the rocks are performing with all the dynamic range we have inside of the scene okay so for this last test shot we're gonna have a pretty complex one and in here i'm not sure if you can see but i have christmas lights in the background here and my cottage and these are gonna create very bright parts inside of the pictures and then because we're in the middle of the night all of the rest of this picture is going to be pretty dark so it's really going to create a huge contrast in terms of bright part and the picture and really dark ones for my cameras here i have the google pixel 4a on the tripod and also i have the canon 6d mark ii right under and i know that the google pixel 4 because it's on the tripod is going to use its astrophotography mode and that means it's going to take 16 seconds shutter speed photos and it could take multiple photos and merge them together afterwards so i'm gonna go on my camera and also set it manually to 16 seconds to be sure we have the same shutter speed on both cameras so we get similar results in the end so let me set this up take the two pictures and we're gonna see the results i honestly thought this would be a super easy win for my dslr but looking at the shots on my cameras i'm actually not really sure which one has better raw file inside of it so we're gonna have to go inside go in lightroom and really look at the files to see which one is better so let's see you [Music] inside before starting to compare these shots i want to let you know that there's a link in the description down below where you can find all the high resolution edited shots and even some of the raw files i will be talking about editing techniques i use when editing my shots and i also already edited all of the shots to speed up the process a little bit if you want to learn more how i did my shots you can check out my editing videos to learn more about that it would also be a great time to subscribe to the channel if you haven't already start by talking about how to recover your exposure because this is probably the main reason why you want to be using a raw file so if we take the canon shot and you can look at the corner here and see that's a dot cr2 so that's a canon file and if it's dng that's a pixel file we can actually see that if we come here and move the exposure we have a lot of information inside of the sky and also inside of the shadows so if we come in here and we apply the edit we're gonna see it looks pretty good and now if you come on the pixel shot you might realize that it's a lot more overexposed and it might be scary at first but that's totally normal all the canyon rafaels are overexposed so if we come in here and we bring down the exposure we can see we're able to recover a lot of that information one thing to look to is the snow here so snow is really easy to overexpose so if you bring down the exposure here so if i go back at the beginning you can see it was completely overexposed and if we bring it down we get all the details inside of here and if we bring down the highlights we can see we can recover even more information if i apply the edit here we're going to see that if we look at the pixel shot here that we have and we look at the canon shot they look very similar so we can edit them and get a very similar result now if you look at our overexposed shot so here i have my canon shot that was overexposed by one stop and we come inside of the light so if we look at the snow again we're gonna see it's a little bit overexposed but if we bring down the exposure we can see that now we have more detail inside of the bottom here and if we bring down the highlights we have even more information if we look at the pixel shot it might look like if it's totally bad and it's not impossible to recover but actually because it's a raw file you can come in here on the slider bring this down almost three stops bring down the highlights and you still have all this information inside of the snow here which is pretty impressive uh so if i apply the edits here again to these two shots we're gonna see again they look very similar between the two so we have the pixel shot here the canon shot and then we have the original pixel shot and the canon shot that were well exposed and they all look the same and this shows how much information you can recover using a raw file now i want to talk about why you should be using raw because i think some people still understand what's the difference between a raw and a jpeg shot so i have my only jpeg shot in here for this edit so i'm gonna go inside of the light here and bring down the exposure like we did with the previous shots and now if we look at this shot it actually looks pretty bad so if we look at the center here there's a big circle that is orange which really doesn't look good then if we look at this on the bottom here we did recover some of the details but now we have some blue and some pink artifacts which just doesn't look good and the trees just look terribly bad another thing to look to is if you look at the sky here you can see that the sky has also these weird artifacts inside of them and if we compare this sky with the raw picture we can see the raw picture looks 100 natural where this jpeg shot just doesn't look as good now if we move on uh to the next shots here we can see that these were underexposed so the pixel actually underexposed because it's easier to recover shadows and highlights so if we bring back up this canon shot for more exposure we can see we still have all the detail even if it was underexposed by one shot the pixel shot was rightly exposed so if we bring it down a little bit we can see again it works quite well now if we come here and we apply these idiots we're gonna see again they look pretty similar between the two here let's talk about why you should care taking raw pictures for me the reason i think raw pictures are super important is for example when i used to do events especially when i had a flash on my camera i would go inside of the event take some pictures and usually when you take pictures during the event you don't look at your results right afterwards on your camera screen because you're taking the most pictures possible during the event and sometimes by accident either if i'm in manual settings or if in automatic metering modes it would automatically overexpose or on the explosive in my shots especially when i had a flash and that meant that i would come back home and have some of my pictures that were completely overblown or some of my pictures that were underexposed and i had to recover all the details inside the shots and this is where our raw pictures really come handy because if you had gps you probably just wouldn't be able to do that another reason that's really important is that if you're taking astrophotography shots or things like that where you need to get the most information out of the sensor you really want to have a raw file to be able to afterwards take out all these details from the picture it's a little bit different with a phone because the phone usually has an automatic metering mode and the automatic metering is actually really good on the phones usually so it's not as much of a problem but it's still something to keep in mind when you're taking raw pictures now let's move on and talk about dynamic range because this is pretty important inside of raw file so if we look at the canon shot we can see right away there's a lot of information inside of the highlights and the shadows and if we come here and apply dated we can see we can recover even more information inside of the trees here and inside the highlights both in the snow and the sky and if we come on the pixel shot it like might look a little bit uh bad at the beginning but again if we apply the edit here we can see we have a lot of details inside of the bottom here we don't have much noise inside of the trees and the top part looks pretty good so for both shots it's pretty good now if we move on to a second example here we're going to see this is a pretty complex shot with all the colors in the foreground and the very bright parts inside of the snow and the clouds and there's a very small difference if we look at both shots here and it's that at the top here the pixel and the clouds has a little bit less information but it's a very subtle difference if we come at the light here we cannot really recover more we could bring down the exposure but the highlights are already down completely so it's not really something we can do but that's a pretty small difference where there's a bigger difference is inside of this example where i have a sunset so for here i want to recover the most information possible inside of the dark parts and inside of the shadows inside of the color so if we bring down the highlights here on the canon shot we can see we can recover all the colors inside of the highlights of the shots and if we bring up the shadows completely we can see we can recover all the colors and all the detail inside of the shadows and if we zoom in inside of here we can see the image is still perfectly clear and very nice there's not much noise or anything like that now if we come on a pixel shot here and we bring down the highlights and bring down the shadows you might realize right away there's a lot less color inside of both of them so this doesn't seem to be as much color information inside of the highlights and the shadows when you bring them to the maximum it's not something i do all the time but sometimes it happens in a situation like a sunset it's actually something you might want to be able to do so it's something to keep in mind this brings me to the point that surprised me the most and it's how much different the colors look on both shots so if we come inside of the canon shot here we can see there's a lot of detail inside of the colors instead of the highlights and the shadows and just looks very natural in the end where the pixel is a little bit lifeless it's less missing a little bit of saturation and a little bit of color if we come inside of other shots here we can see it's the same scenario here uh between these two shots where the cannon shot looks a little bit better one thing is that you can recover the colors inside of lightroom pretty easily when it's a raw so you could bring out the vibrance a little bit more and you could tweak a color temperature between the shot to fix it same thing when you come inside of this shot here we can see that the colors here look a lot more natural inside of the trees here a little bit more orange and a little bit warmer we look at this shot it's a lot colder and not as good looking and this comes from sensor calibration so you have different sensors that calibrate your raw files in a different way so this is something that's pretty easy to fix but it's something that just you need to keep in mind that when you take a picture with pixel phone you're gonna have to work a little bit more afterwards to be able to fix it now if you come in the next thing i want to talk about and it's probably the worst part of the pixel raw files is the detail inside of the shot so if we zoom inside of this shot here on the canon shot we can see that other branches look very natural there's detail but it's not over sharpen where if we come inside of the pixel shot here when we zoom in we can see it's completely over sharpened now where it becomes very impressive is when we look at these night shots so if i come inside of this shot here and bring up the exposure of the cannon shot we can see we can recover a lot of the details inside of the background here of all these branches and everything and if you look at the top here we can see there isn't much noise at all inside of the shot even if we brought it up almost two full stops and now if we come on the pixel shot we can also bring up the exposure here and see that we recover a lot of the detail inside of the branches at the top here but there is a little bit more noise inside of the pixel shot and there's a little bit more color noise which is a little bit worse but overall it's still pretty uh clean shot and now if we look at the highlights here it might be scary because the highlights are completely overblown but if we apply the edit here and have a right exposure for our shots on both pictures we can see that the canon shot here can recover pretty much everything inside of this shot and same thing for uh the pixel shot so they're both pretty impressive there's one place that even if you take a raw file a dslr is still going to be a lot better and that's for depth of field so if we look at the feel here on the shot of my dog you can see we have a nice blurry background but if we compare it to the other shot here uh from my google pixel we can see the background is not as blurry and not as pleasing to look same thing for this shot here so this is the one from the pixel it looks actually pretty good but now if we look at the shot from the canon dslr it's just a lot better again if you come inside of portrait so portrait mode doesn't uh output a raw file on the google pixel so if we look at the background here we can see it's actually perfectly in focus and the face is also pretty in focus but if we look at the shot from the dslr again the background is just out of blurred and a lot of better looking so there is still difference between the two and there are some things that raw files on cameras cannot change in the end i was honestly really surprised by the results i got the fact that i can exit both pictures using the raw files and get almost identical shots is super surprising to me i want to finish by telling this i make these videos because i'm really surprised of the results i'm getting not to try to say if a phone or dslr are better the dslr has relied on a bigger sensor and bigger lenses for generations and produce consistent better results on the other hand phones use computational photography including photo stacking algorithms and all kinds of crazy stuff to get better results i think it's important to remember that none of these are better and it depends on the context you're using them so sometimes using a phone is better sometimes using a dslr is better also both of them are tools and in photography the tool doesn't really matter it's the result you're getting so as long as you're satisfied with the result you're getting from both cameras they're both tools that work perfectly well this is also the reason why on instagram i don't post which camera i used to take the pictures because i care about the result not a tool i use to get there talking of instagram if you want to come and say hi come and write a message i try answering to all of them on that platform if you enjoyed this video please leave a like below it really does help the channel also if you watch the video until now and still haven't subscribed to the channel what are you waiting for hit that big red subscribe button i have a lot of good content planned for 2021 so be sure to be part of this community see you in the next one bye
Video Links
- 🔗 PART 1: Computational Photography vs DSLR
- 🔗 📸 HIGH-RES & RAW PHOTOS
- 🔗 BUY THE GOOGLE PIXEL 4a (affiliate link)
- 🔗 EDITING TUTORIALS
- 🔗 Google AI Blog
- Google Pixel 4a 🍂 Real World 🍂 Review: Still a photography beast in 2020?
- HOW TO shoot STARS with a PHONE + Pixel 4a ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY mode review
- Taking pictures in the morning will elevate your photography to another level (landscape & travel)
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
After my first comparison focusing on computational photography, I wanted to dig deeper and answer a bigger question: can the Google Pixel 4a actually compete with a professional DSLR when we compare RAW files? The Pixel 4a costs around $350; my Canon 6D Mark II costs $3,500. I took both cameras to the beautiful Mont-Tremblant ski resort to find out.
Here's what I discovered about how each camera captures RAW data. The Canon simply records the raw sensor information from every pixel and saves it. The Pixel does something more sophisticated—it captures multiple frames and uses averaging techniques to reduce noise and preserve detail in shadows and highlights. This is computational photography at the sensor level.
When I tested dynamic range, exposure recovery, and detail, the differences were sometimes subtle and sometimes striking. Both cameras handle pushing exposure up or down in post-production remarkably well. The Pixel's multi-frame averaging actually helps preserve highlight detail—Google deliberately underexposes slightly to ensure no blown highlights, which is smart. When editing these RAW files side by side in Lightroom, I could often achieve nearly identical final results, which honestly surprised me.
The biggest gaps I found were in color information and sharpening. The Canon's RAW files retained richer, more saturated colors in the highlights and shadows, while the Pixel's files felt a bit more lifeless and needed more work in post. The Pixel also applied aggressive sharpening that sometimes looked unnatural when I zoomed in.
But here's where the Pixel shined: low-light RAW performance. In night photography, that multi-frame stacking technique really paid off. With minimal noise and solid detail recovery, the Pixel held its own against the full-frame sensor—at least until we talked about depth of field. That's where the DSLR's larger sensor and glass lenses pull decisively ahead. No RAW file can replicate that shallow depth of field.
The honest takeaway? Neither camera is simply "better." A DSLR has physics on its side—bigger sensor, bigger lenses, better optics. A phone has algorithms on its side—stacking, AI scene detection, computational magic. The right tool depends on what you're shooting and what you need. What matters most is the final image you're happy with.