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Google has been on a tear with image generation lately, and [Nano Banana 2](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/nano-banana-2/) might be the most impressive thing they’ve shipped in this space so far. Announced on February 26, the model — technically Gemini 3.1 Flash Image under the hood — merges the quality of Nano Banana Pro with the raw speed of Gemini Flash. The result? Sub-second 4K image generation. Yeah, you read that right.

The speed comes from a technique called Latent Consistency Distillation, which lets the model produce high-quality images in just 2 to 4 steps. That means you go from prompt to a full 4K render in under a second, with support for resolutions from 512px all the way up. What really caught my attention, though, is the subject consistency feature. You can maintain up to five characters looking like themselves across multiple generations, while keeping 14 objects faithful in a single scene. That’s huge for anyone doing storyboarding or building visual narratives.

There’s also real-time web grounding baked in — the model pulls from Gemini’s search capabilities to improve accuracy on real-world references. Need it to render a specific landmark or a recent public figure? It actually knows what those things look like now instead of just guessing.

The internet noticed immediately. The [Hacker News thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43167858) pulled in 300+ points and nearly as many comments on launch day. [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/26/google-launches-nano-banana-2-model-with-faster-image-generation/), [CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/google-launches-nano-banana-2-updating-its-viral-ai-image-generator.html), and pretty much every major tech outlet covered it within hours. Google also introduced the Banana-SDK alongside the launch, which lets developers snap on specialized LoRA modules — they’re calling them “Banana-Peels” — for tasks like architectural rendering or stylized character art without retraining the base model.

For developers, Nano Banana 2 is already available through the [Gemini API, Vertex API, and AI Studio](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/build-with-nano-banana-2/). Pricing sits around $0.067 per image at the Flash tier, roughly 50% cheaper than Pro. It’s also now the default image generator across the Gemini app in Fast, Thinking, and Pro modes, so if you’ve used Gemini recently, you might already be seeing its output without realizing it.

Honestly, the combination of speed, quality, and price here is hard to ignore. Whether you’re prototyping app visuals, generating marketing assets, or just messing around, this one’s worth trying out.