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Google Pixel 10 Pro XL First Impressions: A Photographer’s First Week
HI-RESOLUTION PHOTOS: https://loicba.me/blog/google-pixel-10-first-week
I unbox the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL and take it on real adventures—hiking Mount Rainier, exploring Seattle, kayaking at Aqua Verde—to test its camera, video, and AI features. From HDR video to zoom, panoramas, and build quality, here are my first impressions of Google’s latest flagship.
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► CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:00 Introduction
00:22 Unboxing of the Google Pixel 10 Pro
01:00 Next videos about the Google Pixel 10 Pro
01:46 Camera settings to change
03:33 First photos & videos from the Google Pixel 10 Pro!
04:22 Day 2 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro
05:49 First thoughts about the zoom options
06:51 Day 3 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
07:53 Build quality
09:01 Screen Birghtness
09:31 Photo Preview Issues
10:01 Testing the new panorama mode of the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
11:24 First low light test of the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
12:04 Day 4 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
13:10 Screen Brightness (again!)
15:25 Camera remarks
16:06 Day 5 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
16:32 Video Boost - First thoughts & Issues
18:36 Day 6 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
19:44 Day 7 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
19:53 A few thoughts after a week with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
20:48 Portrait Mode Improvements
21:29 HDR Photo Processing
21:56 My Biggest Issue with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL - Video Boost
23:04 New Sensor
24:09 Face Unlock
24:48 Pixel Snap Accessories!
26:29 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
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- 0:00 Intro
- 0:22 Unboxing of the Google Pixel 10 Pro
- 1:00 Next videos about the Google Pixel 10 Pro
- 1:46 Camera settings to change
- 3:33 First photos & videos from the Google Pixel 10 Pro!
- 4:22 Day 2 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro
- 5:49 First thoughts about the zoom options
- 6:51 Day 3 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 7:53 Build quality
- 9:01 Screen Birghtness
- 9:31 Photo Preview Issues
- 10:01 Testing the new panorama mode of the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 11:24 First low light test of the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 12:04 Day 4 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 13:10 Screen Brightness (again!)
- 15:25 Camera remarks
- 16:06 Day 5 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 16:32 Video Boost - First thoughts & Issues
- 18:36 Day 6 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 19:44 Day 7 with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 19:53 A few thoughts after a week with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL
- 20:48 Portrait Mode Improvements
- 21:29 HDR Photo Processing
- 21:56 My Biggest Issue with the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL - Video Boost
- 23:04 New Sensor
- 24:09 Face Unlock
- 24:48 Pixel Snap Accessories!
- 26:29 Conclusion - Thanks for watching!
I just got a very exciting delivery right here. And this is the Google 10 Pro XL. So, let's unbox it and then head out to start taking some photos with this phone. I'm so excited. For those of you new to the channel, I'm Luke Mahford, a young photographer and filmmaker on the gym become better at this side. Let's get this phone unboxed. So, if you come to the back here, it's actually pretty nice because it seems to be all done with recycled materials, but we seem to have to pull these two little levers. And then we can come up on the box here. Wow, it's actually pretty tight. I was not expecting this to be this hard. And then if we come here, push it down and let's do a nice reveal here. If we take it out, take this off. It is nice that it does come with a cable here. I really like these cables. And now for the very first time, let's power it on. So here we go. It just started booting to the little Gemini Mination with the Google one. Okay, so while I start setting up this phone, I quickly want to talk about the different videos I'll be making about this [music] phone. So this first video will concentrate on going outside, starting to take some photos, and just getting my first [music] impression to see how I like it. I'm going to go on a very nice hike tomorrow, so I'm really excited to bring this phone along and test [music] it. Then the second thing we're going to do is do a video uh full depth review. So I'm going to take some time, take 2,000 photos with it, and then determine if I like it or not. I'll also do some comparison with my Sony A74, [music] my better camera, and also test it compared to other cameras, maybe like the DJI Pocket 3 and things [music] like that to see how it works in all kinds of scenarios. I might also do a dedicated video about all the AI features inside of it because there's [music] so many of them that it probably should have its own video. I just made it to the climbing gym and the process of setting up the Google 10 Pro XL was very seamless. I had no issues transferring stuff. I selected a few application. I didn't transfer everything because I actually wanted to be able to set it up and get a nice fresh experience on it, but I did transfer some settings and things like that. And overall, this phone is already working pretty well and I have most of what I need installed already. Now, before we head inside, I need to change a few settings in the camera app because I did realize that some of the settings are a little bit weird. So, if we go inside of here, we're going to first open our camera and look at the photos. Uh, if you don't know on Android, you can always just double press on the power button to open the camera. And we can look here at our photo settings. So, first of all, I want to make sure that if we go inside of the pro settings, we have the RAW option selected. I want to be able to have RAW plus JPEG to have flexibility if I want to edit the photos a bit more. Usually, I like putting the manual lens selection to make sure I always have the correct zoom that I want. But in this case, I'm actually just going to leave it on auto. Uh, and see how well it works in my test or not. Uh, then I'm going to go here. I realize I also set up the grid. So, I want to make sure that here in the grids, I have a 3x3 grid uh inside of the camera. And now, if we move inside of the video settings, there's a lot more that we need to change here. So, right here, we're going to come inside. I don't know why by default it's on full HD and not on 4K. So I'm going to select 4K right here. I also prefer filming videos in 24 frames per second. So I'm going to select that. And finally HDR is off, which is really weird because you will want to get better videos to see them on the screen when you have an HDR display. So I'm going to enable this one. If we go inside of the pro settings or more settings, there's not that much to change here. So overall here for the video, it looks pretty good. So now I think we're in a good state to start using this camera inside of the climbing gym. [music] [music] [music] That's how easy this is. [music] [music] [music] Heat up. [music] [music] We just made it here to this beautiful 360 view with something in the background. We're almost to the highest point end right here of our hike. Uh it's been a very nice hike here in Mount Valerier. Uh up to now I've been really liking using this camera. Uh it seems working really well. Also the video seems to be a lot a lot better. The self seems to be way better than my Pixel 6 Pro. So I'm very excited to review this footage afterwards. [music] Oh [ __ ] So, usually I really do not like digital zoom on cameras. I think kind of a gimmick even on the Pixel phones. But I must say here that we just saw a goat and being able to zoom at a 50 time zoom and actually using the AI afterwards to be able to enhance it was a very impressive experience. It's not perfect. it won't work on people or things like that, but on the few tests I did, it does really, really well at improving a photo. Now, there's a big question of what is a photo, but that's a discussion for another time. [music] Okay, so we just made it here to the ferry terminal. We totally forgot to check the time to know what time our ferry was. So, we just made it when the ferry left. So, we have about uh 40 minutes to move. So, we're going to go around downtown here and enjoy the pier here in Seattle. AP compari star. We just left Seattle and the view in the background simply never gets old. I always love taking the ferry to Bane Bridge because the views are beautiful. Uh while we're getting there, I want to quickly talk about the build quality of the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL. It does feel like Google finally found a design that works really well. It feels really premium in the hands. It feels good. It feels like it's built to last. So, that's very good. The only thing I have is that they remove the SIM slots. So, now there's only two e SIMs inside of it. So, I can still use two SIMs. Um, the process was pretty painless passing from my old phone to the new phone, that was not an issue. But, it is something to keep in mind if you enjoy having a e SIM card inside of your device. So, we've been enjoying Bane Bridge right now and One thing I really enjoy on the Pixel 6 Pro is actually how bright the screen is. It gets really, really bright and you can really see the difference whenever you're looking at some photos in HDR. You really see the highlights pop a lot. Uh, it kind of gets used to because I was kind of weird at the beginning, but I do really enjoy the bright screen right now. [music] One thing I just noticed while taking some photos on the phone is actually that the preview is very saturated. The good thing is that once it processes the photos, they're a lot more natural. It looks a lot better. [music] Uh looking the photos on the screen up to now, they look really good. I'm really curious to see them on a bigger device afterwards to see if they're going to look as good as on [music] this screen because like I said previously, this screen is really, really good. [music] One quick thing I want to test here on the camera is the panorama mode. I know it's not exactly new from this version, but it was improved in previous versions of the Pixels. Uh they use their whole HDR pipeline to create better looking photos. So, I'm really excited to see how it's going to work and if the results are going to be good because I love taking some panoramas while I'm traveling. One very interesting thing here when we look at the UI of the new interface here is whenever you start taking the picture, it actually going to show you at the top here the progress. So you see the new photos getting added here. I think it's a very clever way of showing the progress and making it a lot easier to take the shot. One little downside is I realized once you stop it takes quite a lot longer to process the images. as it's a very intense process, but the results up to now on the phone look really good. [music] [music] I'm very curious to see how the low light video is going to turn out here. There's a little bit of light from the ferry and the background here, but the background is actually pretty pretty dark right now. Attention, please. [music] We made it to Aqua Verde Today we're going to go on [music] a kayak tour. Uh it's a nice little restaurant here in Seattle that also offers kayak tours and we're go on the lake with views of the downtown [music] parks is pretty well known. So it's a pretty exciting day and a great way to test my phone uh and see how good it's going to perform in a very nice sunny day. And also, this Mexican chai [music] is really, really good. If you're around here, I highly recommend it, especially on a hot day like today. It's amazing to have. Up to now, I really haven't seen the quality of the photos and videos on my computer. So, I'm really curious to know how you [music] think they are. So, let me know in the comments down below if you think if the photos and videos are any good. I'm currently using the frontfacing [music] camera on the Pixel 10 Pro XL that has a 48 MP sensor. So, I'm very curious to see if this camera is better, because it used to be not the best video quality from the front-facing camera. One very concrete reason I realized why it's great to have a brighter screen is actually that a day like this where it's very sunny, I used to be have a really hard time seeing my screen when I was taking a video where now I have no issues at all to see the screen while taking the video, which is really nice to take photos and videos in bright sunny day. [music] Time to deal. See about it. house. This was a great adventure. It's the first time I really go around the boat house and explore all of that. And the Pixel 10 Pro was a great device to actually capture all of this because it's fully waterproof. So, I wasn't scared if any water would go on it. The only thing I had to be very very careful is make sure that it wouldn't fall in the water because then I wouldn't be able to recover it. Uh but because it's pretty non-slippery, I would say design, it wasn't bad at all. I had no issues at all using it inside of the boat. Two little things I just noticed right now when taking the photos is first of all every single time you take videos it does zoom in quite a lot. This is part of the better stabilization and also uh some of the processing they're doing on the videos. It's not the end of the world but still pretty intense. And then the second thing I realized that's actually really cool is that you can use now your 5x zoom to take some panorama shots. I know again this is not new to this phone specifically, but it worked really well and allowed to get some much cooler panoramas from being stuck on the one time zoom only. This morning I looked at some of the footage I got from the video boost. This is basically going to process a video on some servers and then send it back. Uh the video results were pretty good. It really did allow to get better stabilization out of the sensors, which was pretty nice. But my main issue with this is actually that it doesn't show up all the time. So whenever you start the app, especially when you go into 5x zoom, they're going to prompt you to use it. But if you forget to select it, that could actually be kind of an issue because then it's not going to be able to apply it afterwards. So it's kind of annoying that every single time you want to use it, you have to enable it. It would be nice if there was a setting to always use it. Uh, but I understand that because we're sending it to the cloud, it's [music] kind of pretty intensive on using the internet and things like that. So, they probably don't want to do that. Uh, but overall, it does look to work pretty well to stabilize the videos and get better results. I haven't used it in night side or something like that. So, definitely have to test it more in the full review. [music] [music] Heat. Hey, Heat. [music] Heat. Heat. [music] [music] Why are you Heat. Heat. [music] [music] It's already been just above a week that I got the Google 10 Pro XL. Uh, up to now, I've been really enjoying this phone. Again, I didn't have full time to test every single feature in it, especially a lot of the AI ones. We'll have to go in my full review. Uh, but one thing I really did enjoy here is actually the different zoom options instead of the camera app. I'm usually not the biggest fan of digital zoom like I talked in the past. But because here these are cropping inside of the sensor, instead of actually just doing full digital zoom, I do think a lot of the results are a lot a lot better than usual. And it's really great for a day like today where I want to take some pictures of the birds with the phone to see how well it works. I'm also very curious to see how well the AI when we zoom above 30, how well that's going to work. So, we're going to test all this out today here in this beautiful bird reserve. One of the big improvements I have compared to my Google 6 Pro is the new improved portrait mode. It's very nice now that the lines are more natural around the head. They did say they improved it for some hair and I do think it's getting better. But the really cool thing is actually works in night side and some other different modes like that. So, opens all kinds of new possibilities. I haven't tested it yet with the 50 megapixel mode, so I'm not sure if that's going to yield better results, but we'll see that in the full review. One thing I just noticed while looking at the photos is actually that I really like how Google processes the skies in HDR. If you look at a lot of photos from uh Apple devices or from iPhones, the skies are very very very bright because in reality they are actually pretty bright. But when taking a photo, this doesn't look that good. So, I like that Google brings them down a little bit. They're still very bright on HDR screen, but not as bright as an iPhone. And this looks a lot more natural when you're looking at the photos. So, the only real issue I've had up to now with my Google 10 Pro XL is around the video boost feature. What I didn't know is that all of this has depended on your Google Photos setting for uploading stuff to the cloud. So, I have storage saver enabled because I upload all my original clips to my NAS device. I have all the raw files and the high quality files from my phone uploaded to the NAS. So, I don't really need the high quality backup to Google's photos. But what happened is actually that instead of uploading the 4K clips to the cloud, they would upload these lower resolution 1080p clips that didn't have as much information. So, the results coming back were not as good. And this was really annoying because when they would come back to the phone, they would actually delete the original 4K versions. The good thing is because everything was back up to my NAS, I still have these 4K clips, so I can still process them myself. But this kind of defeats the whole purpose of having better quality video if they're going to downgrade everything if you're not paying for cloud storage for Google Photos. And I think this is very frustrating because I don't think that a video feature on the camera should require to pay expensive storage in the cloud just to get access to it. While I took some pictures of the plant in the background here, it reminded me how great the upgrade is to the main camera lens here. I really like the new aperture at 1.67. I didn't think it was going to be that much of an upgrade, but it offers nice natural bokeh in the backgrounds instead of having to rely on the portrait mode to take pictures of close-ups like here. [music] [music] [music] Now, let's talk about another camera feature, but [music] this one is actually not related to photography, and it's face unlock. So, if I just bring up the phone here, I can really quickly unlock the phone. And it's really great when I need to access some stuff quickly. For example, my password manager app and things like that. [music] But the other thing that's really nice is that I still have a fingerprint sensor. So, in situations where face unlock doesn't work, I can simply come here, use my fingerprint, and really quickly unlock the phone. [music] I really like having the flexibility of both having face unlock when it works and then having a fingerprint scanner as a backup. So I basically never have to enter [music] my PIN code. Another feature I really enjoy on Pixel 10 Pro and this is a brand new feature only available on new phones [music] and it's the Mag Safe or Pixel Snap technology. I usually wouldn't use the mags safe term because it's an Apple specific term, but they did give away the design for [music] the magnets for the wireless charging to the wireless consortium. So now we can have the same magnets to [music] use different accessories on our phone. So for example, here I have this little accessory that allows to use it as a popsocket [music] to hold my phone or use it as a stand if I want to put on a table or something like that. [music] But what I prefer even more is the wireless charger. So now I can simply take this and with the magnets start charging my phone wirelessly like this. And this is amazing when I'm taking photos or videos because I can have a nice little slim profile whenever I'm taking photos and when I put in my pocket. Unlike USB [music] cables that tend to always unplug themselves here usually stays stuck really well. So, this is a very nice addition to the Pixel 10 [music] Pros and probably one of my favorite features up to now. [music] [music] This was a very fun morning here going around. I didn't see that many birds, but I was more concentrated on filming the video than actually getting photos of the bird this morning. [music] While I'm waiting for the shuttle for my plane, let's wrap up this video. I really enjoy the Google 10 Pro XL in the last week and a half that I had it. Overall, it's a huge upgrade for me compared to the Google 6 Pro. The camera are better, the screen is better, the battery life is better. So, pretty much everywhere there's an upgrade. It's also faster, doesn't overheat as much, but there's also so much more to test inside of it. There's so many AI features I didn't try. There's so many camera features I didn't try. So, all of these are going to come up in the next videos I'm going to be creating about this phone. So, if you enjoyed this video and you want to learn more about the Google 10 Pro XL, definitely subscribe for more videos. And if you enjoy the video, let me know by hitting like button in below. See you in the next one. [music] [music] [music] Baby, baby, [music] baby. [music] [music]
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What is this video about?
I just unboxed the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL, and instead of sitting in a studio, I took it straight out into the real world. Over the course of a week, I brought it on a hike up Mount Rainier, explored Seattle by ferry, went kayaking at Aqua Verde, and visited the local bird reserve. This video is all about what I actually experienced in those first seven days—no scripts, just honest observations about what works and what's still worth digging into.
The camera was my main focus. What struck me immediately was how much better the video is compared to my Pixel 6 Pro. The stabilization is noticeably improved, and enabling HDR video makes a real difference in how the footage looks. The zoom system is genuinely impressive too. I was skeptical about digital zoom before, but Google's approach here—where the crops happen on the sensor itself rather than as pure digital zoom—produces surprisingly good results. Even at 50x zoom with AI enhancement, I got usable shots of details I couldn't see with my naked eye.
On the photography side, the new portrait mode feels more natural than before, especially around hair and edges. The bright screen makes a practical difference when you're trying to frame shots in bright sunlight—something I noticed immediately while kayaking. The panorama mode works well and now supports the 5x zoom, which opens up cooler composition options. I also noticed Google's approach to HDR sky processing: they keep them bright but not oversaturated, which feels more natural to me than what I see on iPhones.
The build feels premium and durable. It's fully waterproof, which gave me peace of mind on the water. The addition of Pixel Snap (Google's version of Mag Safe functionality) is genuinely useful—I used the magnetic wireless charger more than I expected, and the pop-socket accessory came in handy.
There are some things that need attention. Video Boost is a great feature, but it's frustrating that it depends on your Google Photos backup settings. If you're using storage saver mode like I do, it downconverts your 4K footage to 1080p before processing, which defeats the purpose. That felt like a missed opportunity for a seamless experience. I also noticed that the camera app defaults to Full HD video instead of 4K, which isn't ideal out of the box.
After a week, my honest take is that this is a huge upgrade from my Pixel 6 Pro. The camera system is stronger, the screen is brighter and easier to work with, and the battery lasts longer. But there's still so much to explore—all the AI features, more extensive low-light testing, and deeper dives into the video processing. Those will come in my full review.
If you want to see all the photos and video clips in high resolution, I've posted them on my blog. And if you're curious about how this phone stacks up in specific scenarios, let me know what you'd like to see in the comments.