“When you use your smartphone to take pictures, it's maybe a little bit different compared to a professional camera used in the studio. You can still distinguish between those, but our end goal is to blur the lines between the two,” Marius Eschweiler, Vice-President, Business Unit Mobile at Leica Camera AG, explains how Leica and Xiaomi’s collaboration may change the idea of mobile photography as we know it today. Eschweiler, who has been with the iconic German camera maker for a decade, agrees smartphones have physical restrictions to put bigger sensors but he also adds that computational photography can improve your camera shots dramatically helping your phone in some ways match expensive cameras. “With smartphones having that restriction on the form factor, you have to look for different solutions,” he says. “One aspect is using multiple lenses but computational imaging and algorithms are helping us a lot to get the best out of the physically restricted smartphones,” he adds. Xiaomi and Leica first announced their collaboration on working on advanced camera-centric smartphones last year. The 12S Ultra became the first Xiaomi smartphone to offer an entirely new imaging system developed by Leica. The device had a 1-inch-type camera sensor on its rear, far much larger than found on typical modern smartphones. The partnership with Xiaomi and Leica isn’t the first time we are seeing a collaboration between a phone maker and a camera maker. There have been phone brands in the past that had worked closely with camera manufacturers. Both Xiaomi and Leica say they will benefit from the collaboration, as neither company treats this as a mere marketing exercise. “We take into account all the different aspects of the camera system of the smartphone, from the physical components, the lenses to the sensors and the focusing system, it's a core engineering by Leica and Xiaomi,” Pablo A. Noda, Head of development and Engineering Mobile at Leica Camera AG, chimed in, adding that the partnership with Xiaomi is more of a collaboration to “achieve results that are more similar to our professional cameras, thanks to software and hardware tailored for high-end smartphones”. “Our heritage is based on tradition, but we also need to constantly reinvent ourselves,” adds Eschweiler. “It's always good to have influences from outside.” Leica's cameras can cost several thousand dollars and their lenses often cost even more than the cameras themselves. Eschweiler says the partnership with Xiaomi is a way to offer a taste of the Leica experience on a smartphone at a much more accessible price point. For instance, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra comes with a Leica authentic photography style which is aimed at people who have learned or grew up with photography with clever classical cameras and they maybe want to have less saturated colours and grain-like style. To shed light on how deep the collaboration between Leica and Xiaomi is, Eschweiler says the teams are spread across both Leica headquarters and Xiaomi campuses. “There are engineers from Xiaomi who come to our lab in Germany for a month, and sit together, do the lab tests, the subjective field tests and we fine-tune everything together,” he said. “We are two independent companies, but on this project, we work together as one R&D.” While Leica and Xiaomi may have come from two different worlds, the common goal is to improve the phone's photos even more, from low-light photography to improved portrait photography. “We always have to look at the result you may want to realise, and then we have to look at how we can compromise without damaging the impression of the final image and that is our core competency,” explains Peter Karbe, Senior Managing Expert in optics at Leica Camera AG. “You can optimise everything but whether it looks natural or not depends on how you balance it and that is our input.” Xiaomi does have plans to launch more smartphones with Leica’s imaging prowess in the coming months but is yet to share the details. The smartphone giant recently teased a concept smartphone designed to work with lenses in Leica’s M-series lineup. The new concept looks like the existing 12S Ultra, except one can see an image sensor behind protective glass in the center of the camera system. The lens doesn't attach directly to the smartphone. Instead, it requires an adapter between the lens and the smartphone.
