I’ve been running a small side project that needs fast and reliable image generation. After trying SDXL/SD3, Flux, and a few closed APIs, I tested the new NanoBanana Pro models—and it kind of changed my whole setup.

A few things stood out:

1. It follows prompts unusually well. Not “creative drift”, not hallucinating weird hands, just… does what you ask. This alone cut my retries by almost half.

2. It’s really fast. On 1024×1024 I consistently see ~2 seconds, sometimes less. I didn’t expect that. It actually changes how you design the UI.

3. The default style is clean and usable. Not too glossy, not too anime, not too uncanny. Just realistic enough for product photos and people shots.

4. Cheaper in practice. Because it needs fewer retries, the cost per accepted image was lower than SDXL in my tests (1.3 vs 2.2 gens per final result).

I ended up building a small wrapper around it to normalize prompts, clean params and handle retries. If anyone’s curious, you can search “nan0banana” — I’m not posting a link so it doesn’t look spammy.

Curious if anyone else here has played with NanoBanana Pro. How does it compare to what you’re using?