If you’ve ever sat at your Chromebook and wondered, “Wouldn’t this be so much better with a rear camera?” you’re in luck: Google may be planning to retire the Super Res Zoom feature from Pixel phones and bring it to ChromeOS, improving your device’s digital zoom capabilities.
Normally you’d only have your front camera for video calls and the occasional quirky selfies, with Google upping the camera quality, especially for the Chromebook Plus series. The Super Res Zoom feature isn’t particularly useful on a front-facing webcam, but there are ChromeOS devices that do have an external camera, like the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5
Most people don’t use the rear camera much, if at all, on devices that aren’t phones. You may look a little out of place at a social gathering that tries to create special memories by drawing you out Google Pixel tablet and try to take a photo (although we all have that family member who insists on taking photos with an iPad).
You also don’t get the same level of photo quality as on a Pixel phone, nor the same wealth of features available on Google’s phone cameras. But the addition of Super Res Zoom could mean Google plans to change that.
That’s great, but why?
This news comes from 9to5Googlewho saw one change in code in the ChromeOS Camera app which may suggest the addition of digital zoom combined with ‘super resolution’. It seems like the feature might initially be reserved for insiders and developers within a ChromeOS Dev channel, but despite being present in the code, it’s not having a noticeable effect so far.
While it may not sound like a pretty significant change, it’s worth noting that ChromeOS cameras (including internal webcams) didn’t even have a standard digital zoom feature – perhaps a major omission that I’m actually surprised I noticed. never noticed. Combined with the ‘super resolution’ feature, this has huge potential for improving zoomed photo quality on ChromeOS devices. Well… the ones that at least have a rear camera.
That said, how often are you really going to use your Chrome tablet to take super-zoomed photos? The idea of better camera quality is always nice, and the basic addition of digital zoom to ChromeOS cams will be welcome, but it does leave us scratching our heads and wondering: why?