Google ships Nano Banana 2.1 with better text rendering, cuts image price to $0.0336
lmoroney · x · 2026-10-07
- Google rolled out Gemini Nano Banana 2.1, an update to Nano Banana 2 aimed at AI images that need real words: posters, menus, and slides.
- Documented improvements: better text rendering and infographic layout, fixed tiling artifacts on very wide/tall images at 2K and 4K, up to 14 reference images for character/object consistency, and grounding with Google Web and Image Search.
- Pricing is mixed: $0.0336 per 1K-resolution image, half of Nano Banana 2's $0.067; but input tokens rose from $0.50 to $1.50 per million, edits with many reference images cost more, and there's no free API tier. No published benchmarks back the quality claims yet.
- The author suggests testing 20 of your own text-heavy prompts and counting spelling accuracy before switching.
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