Is this the world’s best smart-phone camera?

Leica is perhaps the most storied brand in photography. A portmanteau formed from the name of founder Ernst Leitz and the word “camera”, the first Leica popularized 35mm photography, while the legendary M system standardized the modern rangefinder in 1954 and has a hallowed reputation to this day. 

Leica’s stewardship of its brand, however, has not always quite lived up to its history. The company historically outsourced most of its point-and-shoot camera design to Panasonic, slapping its iconic red dot on existing compacts and charging an unwarranted markup. Early smartphone collaborations with Huawei and Sharp were similarly surface-level.

But for the past few years, a partnership with Xiaomi has quietly been producing what I would say are the best phone cameras in the world. And for the Chinese smartphone maker’s latest flagship device, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, Leica’s branding and influence takes greater prominence than ever.

Two models

Available in China now, the 17 Ultra is sold in two variants; there’s the regular model, and another version called the Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica. I’ve been using the latter model, though the camera hardware is nearly identical across the two.

This is a sleekly designed phone, and it’s the first to carry the Leica red dot. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 in 2010, which is still for my money the best-looking iPhone ever, he said “its closest kin is like a beautiful old Leica camera.” Well, the 17 Ultra really is like a Leica camera — and not just because it also looks like an iPhone 4, right down to the circular volume buttons.

The camera hardware is more capable and impressive than on any phone sold in the United States. The main sensor is a 1” type, the same used in enthusiast compact cameras like the Canon G7 X or Sony’s RX100 series. The telephoto camera, meanwhile, has a 200-megapixel 1/1.4” sensor — huge for a telephoto — and a lens that actually physically zooms. You get 3.2x magnification at the wide end and it goes as far as 4.3x before digital zoom kicks in, amounting to a 75-100mm-equivalent focal length.

That might not sound like a huge zoom range, and in practice it isn’t. But with a sensor this size, results remain extremely sharp by making use of a 2x crop. That means that you can still get high-resolution images at optical zoom quality all the way through the range between 150mm and 200mm.

The Leica model of the 17 Ultra has a control ring around the sizable circular camera module, which can be customized to adjust various functions. I’ve set mine to swap between pre-set focal lengths before reaching the physical zoom range, making it easy to make sure I’m always getting the best optical quality. There’s satisfying haptic feedback as you turn the ring, lending the phone a more tactile, camera-like feel. 

I do wish the 17 Ultra had a physical shutter button. Xiaomi sells more substantial photography-kit cases that add extra grip and battery to the phone, but no-one’s quite gotten the built-in camera button design right yet and this would have been the perfect phone to do it on. 

The Software

But hardware aside, the real reason behind the success of the Xiaomi and Leica collaboration has been the software. The two companies work together on the image processing pipeline, and the results are beautiful, subtle colors that make for images that just don’t look like they came from a phone. There are two default settings, Leica Vivid and Leica Authentic; I prefer the latter, which gives a vignetted, desaturated and contrasty look that is not unlike the way I prefer to edit photos taken with dedicated cameras.

And the Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica takes this to the next level with a mode called Leica Essential, giving you more options inspired by two classic cameras. These aren’t like built-in filters, as they totally overhaul the phone’s image processing pipelines. The M9 setting emulates the CCD sensor of Leica’s first full-frame digital rangefinder with always-on warm white balance, while the monochrome M3 setting is named after the first 35mm M-mount camera and delivers gorgeously deep, fine-grained photos reminiscent of Leica’s own Monopan 50 film.

These Leica Essential modes aren’t what you’d want to use for casual snapshots or pictures of documents, but they put you in a different mindset as a photographer. In the same way that I choose a dedicated camera to take out for the day and work within its limitations until I get home, there’s something fun and freeing about committing to a virtual M9 or M3 and seeing how it performs. The results are often stunning.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica is the most advanced phone camera anywhere in the world on conventional metrics. But it’s more than that — it’s also by far the most enjoyable to actually shoot. By getting away from the sterility of excessively flattened and oversharpened iPhone or Pixel photos, Xiaomi and Leica have delivered a phone that really does feel like an actual camera.

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