Google Launches Nano Banana 2.1: Performance Boosted, API Now Half-Priced

Beating AI News Flash: Google officially launched Nano Banana 2.1, an upgraded iteration of Nano Banana 2 that remains positioned as a high-efficiency image generation and editing model. Key enhancements span image quality, prompt adherence, text generation, and multi-turn character consistency. Support for the model is now live across Google products including Gemini, AI Mode, AI Studio, Flow, Stitch, and Google Ads, with its API identifier set as gemini-nano-banana-2.1. Image editing is a core focus of this update: Version 2.1 supports 1K, 2K, and 4K resolutions, allows up to 14 reference images at once, and maintains consistency for up to 4 characters and 10 objects. Google has also improved mask editing (modifying only specified areas), plus enhanced infographic layout, image text, and ultra-wide aspect ratio generation. The model now offers three thinking intensity tiers: minimal, medium, and high. In Google’s internal model benchmarks, the thinking-enabled Nano Banana 2.1 outperforms Nano Banana 2 and Nano Banana Pro across all 10 evaluated metrics, including text-to-image, general editing, multi-character consistency, and mask editing. Independent Arena rankings confirm notable gains: 2.1 currently ranks 5th in text-to-image and 6th in single-image editing, the highest among Google’s models, though still trailing GPT Image 2.5 and GPT Image 2. Pricing has shifted overall: Standard API image output costs are $0.0336 (1K), $0.0504 (2K), and $0.0756 (4K), roughly half the price of Nano Banana 2. However, input pricing has risen from $0.50 per million tokens to $1.50, while text and thinking output pricing has increased from $3 to $7.50. The more reference images used and the higher the thinking intensity, the smaller the cost advantage from the lower image pricing.