I agree so much with this comment. Including feeling like I need to switch back to carrying around a proper camera.

When I switched to the Google Pixel 2, the post processing truely was revolutionary compared to other phone cameras and I stopped using anything other than the phone to take pictures. Even back then, iPhone had post processing turned up to a level that most pictures looked a bit “off” to me in the background details, but most people didn’t seem to notice it, even if I tried to point it out. Google’s flagship camera seemed to avoid that over processing and the results were really good. Unfortunately, Google seemed to get cocky about it and just kept increasing the level of processing as the years passed.

Now I’m on a Pixel 7 Pro that I got specifically for the 5x zoom camera and I’ve been consistently pissed off by every zoom picture. Even though it’s an optical zoom, the processing gets turned up so high that I feel like it’s worse than early days low resolution digital zoom. The picture basically looks a pretty decent prompt generated picture vs. a camera shot. It’s kind of ridiculous how bad details get just made up with the pictures out of the 5x zoom lens. The 2x and 1x lenses are substantially better, but still frustrating.

The annoying thing is every photo looks pretty good in the preview thumbnail and even usually looks pretty good in the phone gallery. But if you zoom in or view on a monitor, the digital slurry in the background becomes to apparent. I haven’t tried to print a photo from this phone, but I imagine they would generally look pretty poor.

They’ve optimized so incredibly heavily for the common use case (browsing pictures on your phone) that they’ve forgotten everything else.