No one is talking about how good the Pixel 11's 5x portrait mode is

Published Aug 26, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT Rita is a Senior Writer at Android Police. Her love story with Android started in 2010 and has been going stronger with every update, device, tip, app, and game. She's a huge Pixel fan and has spent an inordinate amount of time using and testing Google's ecosystem, apps, and services. She lives in France, speaks more than three languages, follows Real Madrid, and spends any free time she has traveling. Once upon a time, she was a pharmacist as well. It's been a couple of weeks since I've had my Pixel 11 phones, and I've been spending a lot of time trying to test out everything new. Although, on paper, these seem like reiterative phones, there's surprisingly a lot to discover, and one of them is the new 5x portrait zoom. I've enjoyed snapping portrait photos on my Pixel phones for several years. It's the mode I resort to the most when I'm taking cute pics of my partner when we're out and about, at restaurants, or during fun activities, but until now, it was limited to 2x zoom. The Pixel 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro XL push this up to 5x, finally allowing us to use the telephoto lens for portrait shots. And the results are so excellent that I'm surprised now one is talking about how good it is. 5x portrait on the Pixel 11 is excellent I couldn't stop snapping photos around Paris I was out and about over the weekend in Paris, using both my Pixel 11 and Pixel 11 Pro XL, juggling between maps, messages, browsing, and mostly discovering what all their new camera features can do. Magic Capture gave me some good results with street performers, the 120x zoom proved to be more impressive than expected, the Camera Looks filters are — in my opinion — beyond excellent. But it was 5x portrait that caught my attention the most. The first shot I took with the Pixel 11, the cello player above, left me slack-jawed. It is so sharp and the bokeh effect is phenomenal. Excellent delimitation between artist and background: even the stool's thin legs are very well-defined.There's a minor vagueness around the flowing hair, but it's forgivable. I kept trying the mode in different situations. The violin artist shot, with that nonchalant attitude, cigarette in his mouth, and the excellent bokeh behind the violin is so good, too. The artist pops against the background, despite being close enough to the black bars. Beyond that, there's a pic of my husband walking in an alley near Rivoli, a woman leaning over pillars, and a guy trying to capture a pic of him holding the top of the Louvres pyramid. They all, on first look, appear to be shot by a professional camera. I especially like the difference between clear foreground and blurred background in the pic of my husband walking, because the same pillar on both sides of the passage marks the focus shift. The Pixel 11 isn't simply guessing, it's making an informed decision about where to apply the effect. 5x portrait is even better on the Pixel 11 Pro XL This is my favorite way to take photos now What 5x portrait allows you to do is stay far away from the subject and create a multi-plan differentiation between them and their background. It's the same as shooting a 2x portrait, but you don't need to be so close to your subject to create a portrait photo. And obviously, you don't need to just focus on their face. You can do full bodies. You can shoot inanimate objects, too. I tested this with my Pixel 11 Pro XL. An opera singer in a passageway in Paris, my husband sitting on the Colonnes de Buren in the Palais Royal, multiple statues in the Jardins du Luxembourg — 5x portrait worked well on all of them. Even the giant flower pot in the Luxembourg gardens manages to pop against the palace behind it, with almost every flower and green stick perfectly lined. Looking at the second flower pot on the left shows exactly how the focus level changes between subject and background. But it's definitely the other pics that I enjoyed shooting the most. The three statue ones look like they were taken with a DSLR camera on first glance, thanks to a bokeh result I was never able to achieve with 2x portrait mode on my Pixel 10 and earlier. Forget 120x zoom, this is one of the camera upgrades that matter Google is happy to talk about 120x zoom on its Pixel 11 Pro phones, and 30x on the Pixel 11, but those are just easy numbers to boast about. What really matters with the Pixel 11's camera upgrades are the other changes that Google isn't talking about much. 5x portrait mode is one of those. It's a game-changer for people photography, candid photography, and even non-living-things photography. I can't wait to keep trying it in different settings to see if it always works this well.