Seedream 4.0(seed.bytedance.com)
seed.bytedance.com
Seedream 4.0
https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedream4_0
9 comments
Nano Banana has a significant architectural advantage. Seedream and Qwen exhibit high frequency artifacts throughout their images due to fixed patch sizes in their transformer, RoPE, and VAE components. (16x16 for Qwen, 4x4 for seedream) These models cannot produce clean or more important high fidelity outputs. Nano Banana operates directly in pixel space that means if you are working with input images your images don't get degradged because of the VAE roundtrip and your t2i are not riddled with high frequency noise. That's the advantage of nano banana. Resolution is not an indicator for quality.
Yeah I've definitely noticed subtle coloration changes with Seedream / Qwen 20b as opposed to Nano-Banana. OTOH, Qwen is capable of accomplishing edits that Nanobanana can't handle. [1]
Nanobanana has a strong tendency to just return the exact image back to you in those cases. So it's a bit of a pick your poison issue.
I think it comes down to your use-case. If your intent is professional studio grade photograph manipulation then NanoBanana is your best bet. Otherwise Seedream and honestly Qwen are both perfectly servicable.
[1] https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing (see the M and M test)
EDIT: What does "Nano Banana operates directly in pixel space" mean? Information on the internals of Nano-Banana seem to be pretty sparse. Do you have a source for this?
Nanobanana has a strong tendency to just return the exact image back to you in those cases. So it's a bit of a pick your poison issue.
I think it comes down to your use-case. If your intent is professional studio grade photograph manipulation then NanoBanana is your best bet. Otherwise Seedream and honestly Qwen are both perfectly servicable.
[1] https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing (see the M and M test)
EDIT: What does "Nano Banana operates directly in pixel space" mean? Information on the internals of Nano-Banana seem to be pretty sparse. Do you have a source for this?
It means it doesn't use a vae. I usually do some tests with pixel grids on new models 16x16,8x8,4x4,2x2 and with nano bana there is none of the typical degradation of Vae models. It's probably a similar to what lodestone does with the new chroma radiance model.
https://huggingface.co/lodestones/Chroma1-Radiance
https://huggingface.co/lodestones/Chroma1-Radiance
Its not available in Australia, US might not be on the supported list as well.
Accessing it directly from Bytedance might be an issue, but it's been available via Fal.AI [1] since it was initially announced - that's where I've been doing all my comparative testing (against Nano Banana, Kontex, etc.)
https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/bytedance/seedream/v4/text-to-i...
https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/bytedance/seedream/v4/text-to-i...
Plenty of options.
https://poe.com/Seedream-4.0
https://poe.com/Seedream-4.0
Seedream 4.0 can also handle much higher resolutions. While most image-to-image GenAI models cap out at around 1 megapixel and require downscaling, Seedream supports images up to full 4K so theoretically you should be able to make noticeably cleaner edits.
[1] https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemini-2-5-...