Google's Pixel 10 Camera Decision is Sparking Major Controversy—Here's Why

As we just reported on, the Google Pixel 10 is gaining a telephoto sensor. Just as I had suspected, it’s a fairly small one (but somehow still larger than the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s 3x telephoto). In order to make this happen, Google had to make a very controversial decision with the Pixel 10’s camera setup. Which many are going to hate.

Google is using the Samsung 3J1 sensor on the Pixel 10, as its telephoto sensor. This is the same sensor being used on the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, which is an 11-megapixel sensor that is a 5x telephoto camera. And to be quite honest, it’s not that great.

Now, in order to add this telephoto sensor, Google had to make a decision about the other two regarding space. That decision was to go with smaller sensors on the primary and ultrawide cameras. The primary camera is going from a pretty respectable 1/1.31″ sensor to a 1/1.95″ sensor. That’s not too bad, though we’d still love to see a 1″ type sensor on a Pixel. On the ultrawide, Google is going from a 1/2.55″ sensor to a 1/3.1″ sensor and also downgrading the resolution to 13MP.

Expect Pixel 10 camera performance to be worse than Pixel 9, despite the third sensor

With Google essentially downgrading every sensor here, we’re expecting camera performance to be worse. However, Google does a really great job with its camera software, so there is a chance that we could see similar performance to the Pixel 9. The thing to remember, however, hardware does matter when it comes to camera performance.

Why does the sensor size matter? Well, with a larger sensor, the camera is able to gather more details, including light. So taking a picture in low-light really needs these larger sensors. Google has done some incredible things with Night Sight, but software can only do so much to compensate for a smaller sensor.

The interesting thing here is that, the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro are the same size, including the camera bar. However, Google was able to cram larger sensors on the Pixel 10 Pro. So this doesn’t sound like a “we had to” type thing. But a way for Google to still differentiate the Pixel 10 from its “Pro” models, to justify the price.

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