Google’s finally rolling out the Zoom Enhance camera trick it announced last year

Apparently, turning the cliched “enhance!” meme into reality wasn’t as easy as Google might have initially expected. Today, the company confirmed in a blog post that Zoom Enhance is finally rolling out to the Pixel 8 Pro and will also be present on the Pixel 9 Pro, 9 Pro XL, and 9 Pro Fold at launch.

Google announced the AI-powered Zoom Enhance during last year’s Made by Google event, but we’ve made it all the way to a new generation of phones, and only now is the software feature ready for release. “When you pinch in, Zoom Enhance can intelligently sharpen and enhance the details of your images, so you can get closer than ever, even when you forget to zoom” is how Google’s hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, explained the feature last October.

Fast-forward to today, and Google describes it as such:

Zoom Enhance intelligently fills in the gaps between pixels and predicts fine details for high-quality, post-capture zoom results. It will be available on Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and is rolling out to Pixel 8 Pro starting today.

As my former colleague Jon Porter wrote last year, enhance has been seen in “countless sci-fi movies and police procedural shows that have shown characters zooming impossibly far into photos to reveal clues and details that simply could not have been present in the original image.” The example of Zoom Enhance in Google’s latest blog post isn’t exactly mind-blowing, so it’s possible the company has dialed back its ambitions while developing this feature.

Zoom Enhance joins a slew of new camera software tricks coming to Google’s new Pixels — like Add Me, Reimagine in Magic Editor, and more — and this time, all of them will be available when the phones ship. Seems like Google learned its lesson in that regard.

Check out Becca Farsace’s preview below showing a lot of what’s new with the Pixel camera in 2024.