Camera company Leica has made a phone – here are all the details

Leica has made a Japan-exclusive smartphone, with a heavy focus on camera quality above all else. But what can you expect from the company that has helped to give Huawei its smartphone photography prowess over the last few years?

Read on to find out all the details about this new smartphone.

Price and availability

As previously mentioned, this is a Japan-exclusive phone, meaning the Leitz Phone 1 is produced specifically for the Japanese market and is available from SoftBank, one of the leading distributors of communication technology in the country.

The phone is available for JPY 187,920, which translates to roughly £1,237, meaning that if you’re interested it will cost you a pretty penny.

Camera

The camera is definitely the star of the show here, and you can tell as much just from looking as the massive camera array on the back of the Leitz Phone 1.

Leica promises that the Phone 1 will produce photos that reflect the same image quality as what you might find on a proper Leica camera, with powerful optical capability and image software expertise.

A large amount of the phone is taken up by the lens on the back, but it’s well protected with a magnetic Leica lens cap. The phone packs an F1.9 lens with up to six times digital zoom and an equivalent focal length of 19mm.

The Leitz Phone 1 has one single camera and sadly no optical zoom, with a 1″-type image sensor with 20.2MP resolution behind the lens, which should allow the phone to capture more light in images.

This means you can capture both RAW and JPEG formats, and the camera is paired with Leica’s own proprietary software engine, the Leitz Engine, providing the necessary computational processing that should allow images to pop.

There is also Leitz Looks mode, which has been developed by Leica engineers to deliver sharper black-and-whites in your photos while giving images a typical camera look-and-feel.

Flipping the phone over, the front-facing camera has a 12.6MP resolution and an F2.3 lens.

For the photography nerds out there, the pre-installed LFI.Widget will constantly present the best photos from the Leica Fotografie International Gallery on your home screen, so you’ll always have the chance to be inspired on the go. The selection of categories and frequency of refreshes can also be altered individually, so you can keep up to date with the photography trends that matter most to you.

What features are on the new phone?

Delving a little deeper past the camera specifications, we can see that the Leitz Phone 1 runs on Android 11 and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 5G chip.

The phone’s boasts a 6.6″ WUXGA+ OLED display with 1260 x 2730 resolution, with 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage under the hood.

What’s the design of the phone?

As stated before, Leica has focussed on the design of the camera more than anything else, but the Phone 1 does have a few neat flourishes.

Designed in Germany, the Phone 1 is made with an aluminium case in anodised silver, combined with matt-black Gorilla-glass for a sleek finish.

The phone has knurled edges to help ensure the phone isn’t compromised in wet conditions, with the camera’s lens cap also coming in a shade of silver as the one spot of colour emanates from the iconic Leica red dot logo.