The Pixel 8 is the first phone to capture photos in Ultra HDR, a new format that I think could be the future of mobile photography!

Ultra HDR is something you really need to see to understand, though, so I worked with Dylan Raga to put together a demo that shows it off. The results are STUNNING!

If you're using a Chromium-based browser on a PC running Windows 11/macOS with an HDR display or on a Pixel 7 running Android 14, then you can see these Ultra HDR samples in their full glory by going to the GitHub repo linked in my latest article for Android Police.

On Wednesday, you're going to see a lot of reviews of the Pixel 8 series go up. Unfortunately, since platform support for Ultra HDR is so limited, many of those reviews will be unable to showcase the photos taken from the phone in their full glory.

Most social media sites and CMSes compress images, which will result in the HDR gain map being removed from the Ultra HDR .jpg. Even Windows File Explorer corrupts the metadata when you simply edit the EXIF tags!

Oh, and the photos I took were all from a Pixel 6 Pro using Google Camera 9.1 (pulled from a Pixel 8). This means that yes, certain older Pixels are able to capture in Ultra HDR as well.