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My iPhone is one of the best cameras I’ve ever owned, but it’s also incredibly boring compared to my Leica M11. And that feeling has come back with a bang with the arrival of Leica’s new Leitz Phone 3, her third and most interesting smartphone to date. .
I’ll admit that the Leitz Phone 3’s appeal is further enhanced by the Leica red dot and the fact that it’s only sold in Japan. Naturally, I wanted more, but even from a distance, there are little touches that make you wish your smartphone didn’t have to be a gray rectangle with all the bells and whistles to technically take a “perfect” photo. I know it’s clogged.
First, there’s its design. The Leitz Phone 3 is probably a rebrand of the Sharp Aquos R8 Pro (also a Japan-only phone), but it’s also the closest thing to a combination of a phone and his Leica M series camera. Leica has given the phone a beautiful textured finish and, yes, a lens cap. It’s ridiculous and you’ll lose within 10 minutes, but it’s also a lot of fun.
On a more practical level, the Leitz Phone 3 also adds a number of new software features. Let us know when to dash out and capture the scenery with our exclusive Golden Hour widget. I love Photopills and their iPhone widgets, but Leica’s widgets look especially classy and it’s great to have them included. But the feature I really like sonically is the lens simulation.
glass master
The best and most interesting new feature of the Leitz Phone 3 is the virtual camera lens in Leitz Looks camera mode. These simulate the different apertures of Leica’s three most popular lenses. Noctilux-M 50mm f/1.2, Summilux-M 28mm f/1.4, Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4.
The total cost of these three lenses is $21,085 / £18,220 / AU$35,070. The Leitz Phone 3 can’t come close to the image quality it can produce, as its lens is probably primarily made of plastic. But I think the concept of software-simulated lenses is appealing. In addition to Leica’s tuned bokeh and vignetting characteristics, it would be great if color simulation came by default on phones.
image 1 of Four
It wasn’t long ago that portrait mode on smartphones was an artifact-filled nightmare, but Leica says the Leitz Phone 3 has the look of these three classic lenses at each aperture from f/1.2 to f/8. It is said that it can be simulated. Film simulations, like those on Fujifilm cameras, are now quite common (on this phone they are called Leica Tones), but software that can simulate the characteristics of a particular lens is something else.
That doesn’t mean the Leitz Phone 3 is a replacement for the M11, but it does make it a lot more interesting than the iPhone’s camera app.
What about the actual camera?
As you’d expect from a Leica-branded camera, the camera hardware itself is also very powerful on paper.
Similar to the Leitz Phone 2 launched in 2022, it has a main camera with a 47.2MP 1-inch sensor paired with a 19mm f/1.9 lens. Hardware-wise, it’s comparable to the iPhone 15’s 48MP 1/1.28-inch sensor.
It also has a fairly standard front-facing 12.6MP camera with an f/2.3 aperture, but there’s not much to write home about. However, like any ‘proper’ camera, there’s a microSD card slot to help increase the 512GB of onboard memory, and unusually it also includes a headphone/microphone jack.
All this is also backed up by other interesting software features. The Leitz Phone 3 is the first mobile phone to include a feature called “Leica Perspective Control” built into the camera. This is especially useful for architectural photography, where it helps you make sure the building is standing straight.
While you can do this in post-production using an app like Lightroom (or even use a tilt-shift lens if you have one), the advantage of Leica’s software is that This will show you where you need to trim. vertical line. This is done through a combination of gyroscope measurements and algorithms, and is another useful feature that my iPhone doesn’t have (at least without a third-party app).
These kinds of touches, combined with the LFU widget that cycles through images from the Leica Photography International Gallery, make the Leitz Phone 3 look like a proper photography tool with unique features. However, this also has major drawbacks.
reality check
As with the Leica M11, I think I’m probably glorifying the Leitz Phone 3 and overlooking the practical annoyances that probably don’t make it a fun phone to live with outside of photography.
It runs on Android 14, but it’s unclear how many years software updates will be provided. More importantly, given that neither the Leitz Phone 1 nor 2 have been released internationally, they are only sold in Japan and are unlikely to be released outside of that region.
The Sony Xperia 1 V (a new leak suggests a successor to the Sony Xperia 1 VI will be launched soon) also has some very interesting camera features and software touches. However, I haven’t been able to seriously buy it so far.
In fact, the iPhone 16 Pro I’ll be upgrading to this year will almost certainly become the Canon EOS R5 or Sony A7 IV of the cell phone world when it comes to smartphone photography. In other words, a solid and wise choice, but I’m still happy that phones like his Leitz Phone 3 exist, and I hope we see more phones of this kind outside of Japan. doing.
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