Class-leading performance in readability and color
The Google Pixel 8 Pro is perfectly readable in most situations, including outdoors and in direct sunlight. Its peak brightness is particularly high, with a great 2100 nits measured at 20% APL. While the iPhone 15 Pro Max is able to achieve a comparable brightness than the Pixel 8 Pro on a dark content, it loses almost 50% of its brightness when increasing the APL, against a mere 20% for the Pixel 8 Pro.
Google’s flagship is also well-tuned for lowlight environments. In the dark, it will go to a comfortable 5 nits using the default automatic brightness settings. Overall, it offers a solid and uniform experience, in line with the previous Pixel generations.
When it comes to color rendering, the Pixel 8 Pro has been tested in its default adaptive color mode, which offers a solid and accurate performance. Skin tone color rendering is faithful, in all lighting conditions ranging from low light to outdoors. Overall, the Pixel 8 Pro offers a pleasant and vivid rendering of photos, as well as a well-controlled shift in angle. Despite a slight yellow-green cast outdoors, the Pixel offers a pleasant color rendering.
A good but perfectible performance in video, motion, touch and artifacts
The Pixel 8 Pro presents a solid performance in HDR10 playback, with pleasant brightness and contrast rendering. Its score is slightly hindered by its low brightness when watching SDR videos in low light, where dark content is less visible.
The Google Pixel 8 Pro doesn’t suffer from frame drop issues; however, there were some slight frame mismatches when playing video games. It is also nearly flicker free, similar to iPhones and Samsung devices.
Regarding the Touch attribute, the Google Pixel 8 Pro offers an excellent touch-to-response time. Although it sometimes lacks smoothness when playing video games, its 120 Hz provides very smooth web navigation, and the device has greater accuracy in the corners than its previous generation.
Display Score
With improved specifications and strong tuning, this versatile smartphone offers a flagship-like experience in all lighting conditions and in nearly all use cases.
Like the Pro version, the Pixel 8 is readable outdoors and in direct sunlight. In outdoor environments, the device reaches a peak brightness of 1600 nits when viewing typical photo content, which is a little below the Pixel 8 Pro. The Pixel 8 is slightly less bright than the iPhone 15 when viewing photos, but when it comes to viewing high APL content, the Pixel 8 becomes brighter than the iPhone dropping its brightness by only 7% - to 1500 nits – whereas the iPhone 15 shows a 50% brightness drop to 900 nits.
In color performance, the Pixel 8 offers a similar experience to the Pro version, providing very pleasant colors and excellent skin tone rendering. Although it avoids the yellowish rendering seen on its Apple competitors, the Pixel 8 shows a slight pink cast outdoors when there is a strong light source coming in from the upper angle side; otherwise, it shows a more pronounced yellow-green shift on angle than the Pro version.
When playing HDR10 video content, the Google Pixel 8 presents a similar performance as the Pixel 8 Pro, with a good brightness level in a dark viewing environment, and a pleasant color rendering. The Google Pixel 8 also achieves high marks for touch, with very good touch-to-response time and very smooth web navigation thanks to its 120 Hz screen. It shows a great improvement over the previous Pixel 7 and its 90 Hz display.
Audio scores