The camera is one of the main reasons to buy the Pixel 11 Pro Fold over other foldables. These include a 48 MP main camera on a 1/1.56-inch sensor, a 10.5 MP ultra-wide lens with autofocus and macro mode, and a 10.8 MP 5x telephoto lens, with Google’s AI-assisted super zoom up to 30x. It’s pretty much the same configuration as the base Pixel 11, but with the added telephoto lens offered by the 11 Pro XL, and the results are some of the best you’ll get from a foldable phone in 2026.
The main camera is consistent and detailed, and the larger sensor is useful in dimly lit environments. The 5x telephoto lens is the lens I use the most, outside of the main camera, as I always do. Images remain sharp and detailed, even when you zoom in. Having true optical zoom capabilities on a phone is worth more to me than any ultra-wide camera, no matter how good it is. The ultra-wide is good, but it has the usual pitfalls of this type of lens, and I barely touched it.
What defines a Pixel photo is Google’s image processing, and the 11 Pro Fold is no exception. I wouldn’t call Google’s results more consistent than Apple’s or Samsung’s, but I would say they are more stylistic. If you show me a photo taken by a Pixel phone, I can usually tell. If you view an image in the gallery before processing is complete, the difference between the raw capture and the finished photo is striking, telling you how much the appearance is actually software dependent.
That being said, the 11 Pro Fold doesn’t get everything the 11 Pro and Pro XL phones have. There’s no Pro 120x zoom here, despite the Pro moniker, and video tops out at 4K rather than 8K. Since the Pro zoom stops being reliable beyond about 80x when I use the 11 Pro XL, losing the title number isn’t as big a downgrade as it might seem. The gap between 30x and 80x zoom is rather large, and you may notice it if you zoom in on photos often. It’s an exclusion rather than a deal breaker, but if the camera is your biggest priority, the conventional Pixel 11 Pro probably takes better photos for a lot less money.
Connor Jewiss/BGR
Magic Capture, one of the Pixel 11 series’ most important features, is still a nice idea, but one I won’t use. That’s because it didn’t really work well for me when I used it on this foldable or the other Pixels. It extracts still images from a moving video sequence and displays them in visibly lower resolution. Camera Looks gives you more control over processing than it might first appear, and I still prefer the idea of editing a photo after I’ve taken it rather than applying a filter to every photo I take.
Made You Look, which animates the back screen when the device is opened to attract a child’s attention to take photos, seems really useful in Google’s demos, although I don’t have kids to test it with. Tabletop mode and dual-screen preview are the kinds of features that justify foldables for many, but I’ve never opted for either.
