[Aloisius]

The NBP looks like a mock of food to me - the unwrapped burrito on a single piece of intact tinfoil, a table where the grain goes all wonky, an almost pastry looking tortilla, hyperrealistic beans and there's something wrong with the focal plane.

It's just not as plasticy and oversaturated as the others.

[zenoprax]

Hyperrealistic beans? The focal plane? You are reaching really hard here.

The table grain is the only thing that gives it away - if it weren't for that no one without advance warning is going to notice that it's not real.

[PostOnce]

I am a huge AI skeptic, check my comment history.

I agree with you. The Nano Banana Pro burrito is almost perfect, the wood grain direction/perspective is the only questionable element.

Almost no one would ID that as being AI.

[Aloisius]

Yeah, hyperrealistic beans. They don't look real at all. The inside of an actual burrito is messy after you bite into it (and usually before). That burrito has a couple of nearly dry, yet for some reason speckled, beans that look more like they're floating on top of the burrito rather than actually in it.

And yeah, the focal plane is wonky. If you try to draw a box around what's in focus, you end up with something that does not make sense given where the "camera" is - like the focal plane runs at a diagonal - so you have the salsa all in perfect focus, but for some reason one of the beans which appears to be the exact same distance away, is subtly out of focus.

I mean, it's not bad, but it doesn't actually look like a real burrito either. That said, I'm not sure how much I'd notice at a casual glance.

[zenoprax]

If you're approaching it from a "semantic pixel peeping" perspective then yes, I understand what you mean. It's a pretty clean bite... but it's important to remember the context in which most images will be assessed.

Earlier this week I did some A/B testing with AV1 and HEVC video encoding. For similar bit rates there was a difference but I had to know what to look for and needed to rapidly cycle between a single frame from both files and even then... barely. The difference disappeared when I hit play and that's after knowing what to look for.

For anyone curious: if you are targeting 5-10 Mbps from a Bluray source AV1 will end up slightly smaller (5-10%) with slightly more retention of film grain in darker areas. Target 10 Mbps with a generous buffer (25 MB) and a max bit rate (25 Mbps) and you'll get really efficient bit rates in dark scenes and build up a reserve of bandwidth for confetti-like situations. The future is bright for hardware video encoding/decoding with royalty-free codecs. Conclusion: prefer AV1 for 5-10 Mbps but it's no big deal if it's not an option.

[flir]

Re: focus. It looks like a collage - like the burrito has been pasted in. The Nano Bana 1 image doesn't have that problem.