Am I the only one who doesn't see an obvious difference in the quality between the left and right photos? (Maybe the wolf one) And these are extremely-curated examples!
Objective comparison is always so tricky with Stable Diffusion. They should show off large batches, at the very least.
I think Stability is ostensibly showing that the images are closer to the prompt (and the left wolf in particular has some distortion around the eyes).
No, I have generated a few thousand midjourney images and there is quite a difference in these images actually.
It is hard to describe but there is a very unnatural "sheen" to the images on the left.
The SDXL 0.9 images look more photo realistic but they still aren't quite at the level that midjourney can do.
The best example is the wolf's hair between the ears in the SDXL 0.9 image. It is just a little too noisy and wavey compared to how a real wolf photo would look. Midjourney 5.1 --style raw would still handily beat this image if making a photo realistic wolf.
The jacket on the Alien in the SDXL 0.9 image also has too much of that AI sheen but it kind of works in this image as an effect for the jacket material so not really the best example.
The coffee cup isn't very good on either of them IMO. The trees on the right are still not blurred quite right. They are hiding the hand with this image on the right too. You can see how bad the little and ring finger is on the left image.
For the aliens, the right image has much more realistic gradation. The one on the right looks like the grays have been crushed out of it. There's also a funky glow coming from the right edge of the alien.
I'd say the blur effects on the left images are much cleaner as well. There are some weird artifacts at the fringes of objects in the earlier version.
At the resolution provided they are indeed very close. In my eyes:
In the first example, the second image is more representative of Las Vegas for the foreigner I am, but none of them hav ethe scratchy found film requirement
In the second example, both fit the prompt, but the first image look more coming from a documentary than the second one
in the third example, the hand from the second picture looks much better
The wolf looks better, but also looks less like what you'd see in a "nature documentary" (part of the prompt).
I think the coffee cup looks better in the right phot, it seems a tad bit more real to me.
Like you I much prefer the alien photo on the left, but the photos are so stylistically different I'm not sure that says anything about the releases' respective capabilities.
I prefer the composition of the beta model over the release. Quality wise I can’t say one is better than the other. Maybe the hand in the coffee picture is better for the 0.9 model.