The smartphone camera has reached a technological inflection point. It can shoot RAW files, simulate depth-of-field, and manage low-light scenes with remarkable fidelity. Yet smartphone manufacturers seem to recognize that certain photographic qualities remain territories where camera makers hold decades of expertise, and decide therefore to allocate significant resources to partner with them and associate with their brands.
These partnerships help with differentiation in a crowded market, but also operate at multiple levels. The brand-pairing provides aspirational associations with photographic heritage. Beneath that, however, lies a more technical cooperation: camera manufacturers contribute color calibration methodologies, lens coating specifications, or image processing fine-tuning developed through years of developing professional equipment.
The fundamental constraints of smartphone photography cannot be entirely overcome through partnerships with camera manufacturers and algorithmic optimization.
Take Oppo, for example. The company recently introduced the new Find X9 Pro flagship, whose excellent photographic capabilities are a mix between the company’s tech achievements and Hasselblad’s contribution to the color science and processing calibration. Hasselblad used to be OnePlus’ photographic partner of choice, but the collaboration moved to the parent company Oppo after OnePlus completed its merge with it. In the past Hasselblad also had a stint with Motorola, producing a short-lived (yet very compelling, at the time) camera Moto Mod for the company’s Moto Z series in 2016.
One of the photographic brands that has pioneered these types of partnership is Leica. The German company was originally working with Huawei on improving the brand’s smartphone cameras. After Huawei’s decline in the global smartphone market, the company moved on to partner with Xiaomi, another Chinese giant, since 2022.
China’s largest smartphone vendor, Vivo, has partnered with Zeiss, another German optics heavyweight, which this year - like Hasselblad for Oppo - even produced an external lens for a dedicated photography kit paired with Vivo’s latest flagship, the X300 Pro. Zeiss is not new to this type of strategic collaborations, as it had already worked together with Nokia in the past, and still offers its lens technology to Sony for its Xperia line of smartphones.
The experience and ‘feeling’ of major camera brands remains essential, even in the age of computational photography.
The latest partnership of this kind announced by a smartphone manufacturer is that between Realme and Ricoh, a smaller brand in comparison with the other photography giants, but certainly one of the most beloved by street-photographers obsessed with the company’s GR family of compact cameras.
The new Realme GT 8 Pro is the first flagship sporting a camera system developed together with Ricoh with street photography in mind.
The fundamental constraints of smartphone photography cannot be entirely overcome through partnerships with camera manufacturers and algorithmic optimization. A smartphone sensor will always remain smaller, while professional camera ones span to full-frame 36x24mm dimensions and beyond. Moreover, physical optics impose limitations that computational photography, however sophisticated, cannot fully transcend.
Yet within those constraints, camera brand expertise does prove genuinely valuable. Not just with technical expertise but also imbuing algorithmic pictures with a more photographic taste, which even smartphone manufactures consider central to their products’ perception.