Some Pixel 9 owners are convinced video quality just got worse

Across the world of smartphones, the landscape is always evolving. Every day we see the arrival of new updates, apps, and firmware patches that change the mobile experience for users in myriad ways — both desired and not. And while some of those changes are quite conspicuous, others are much more difficult to characterize, and we’re left wondering if something’s truly different, or if we’re just imagining things. Right now, we find ourselves in just such that kind of situation, asking if Pixel 9 video recording quality is getting worse, or if we’re just hallucinating.

While browsing Reddit’s GooglePixel sub the other day, we spotted a post from user oowwweee that caught our our eye, complaining about worse-than-expected video quality when filming on a Pixel 9 Pro XL past 3x zoom. Even though they were a pretty new owner of the phone, they noted that they only first observed the problem after installing the latest updates.

We might write that off as new-user unfamiliarity, but a number of other owners of Pixel 9-series phones chimed in with their own complaints, and it’s hard to ignore all the details aligning. We seem to be looking at some kind of temporal issue, with stuttering frames or images tearing. It only appears to manifest at intermediate zoom levels, and users report first noticing it after installing recent updates.

Compared to some of the other ways video quality could be impacted, not everyone’s going to necessarily notice or even really be bothered by something like this. That almost makes us even more curious: Is this an actual problem? Let’s hear from you:

More than just knowing whether or not you’re dissatisfied with zoomed video quality on your phone, we want to know exactly which Pixel model you’re experiencing this with. We’ve seen reports mentioning both the 9 Pro and 9 Pro XL, but we’re curious if this is impacting any other handsets, too.

After responding to our poll, scroll down and let us know in the comments which Pixel model you’re testing with, as well as when you first noticed a problem. Hopefully that will give us a little more data towards working out exactly what might be going on here.