Google shipped Nano Banana 2 today. The model — internally Gemini 3.1 Flash Image — replaces the original Nano Banana as the default across Gemini, Search, and Ads. I've already added it to my image editor and made it the default there too.

The numbers matter here. Eight cents per image at 1K, twelve at 2K, sixteen at 4K. The original cost fifteen cents at 1K and thirty at 4K. That's roughly half, and the output is sharper. Text rendering — which the original botched reliably — now validates character by character before the final render. I tested it on watermark removal and text overlays this afternoon. Both worked first time.

The architectural shift underneath is more interesting than the price cut. Nano Banana 2 runs a reasoning loop rather than straight diffusion — plan, evaluate, improve — which explains why spatial relationships and multi-element scenes hold together in ways the original couldn't manage. Four times faster despite doing more work per image.

I'm not sure it fully replaces FLUX 2 Pro for everything. FLUX still handles certain structural edits with more precision. But at eight cents versus five, the gap is small enough that Nano Banana 2 will be where I start most jobs now.

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