Leica chairman contemplates Leica smartphone

I presume smartphone will be made by some noname chinese maker and will have nothing to do with Leica expect it will have red Leica sticker on it.

Quick way to tank the company. Good idea Andreas!

Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft, to name a few, were established smart phone makers that died from stiff competition. Blackberry survives as a software company only. Like its cameras, Leica would be niche-priced and I fail to see how anyone would buy a $2,000 and up Leica phone just because it takes nice pictures. Smart phones are still phones first with camera as bonus not the other way around.

They need to hire the team that "designed" the Hasselblad Lunar. Winner.

Right... Apple and Samsung will rule the smartphone scene forever. And Nokia was also unbeatable at mobile phones with over 1/3 of the global market share...
There will be a move in some direction and Apple and Samsung will lose their dominance. It's just how the world works.

MSRP: $5000

My HUAWEI P9 with the LEICA camera makes beautiful pictures and videos. Indoors photo with a group of people of 50 people, super. Zoom, a lot of different modes. I think that this is a masterpiece.

i comment the thought experiment offered by leica here

the orientation issue is intelligent ...

i hope leica does produce a phone

and i hope if they offer attachments to it it does not brick it

If Leica can manage to get an iPhone Leica it may succeed, there's seems to be a bigger tolerance for price with the iPhone market than the droid market and it would give another option in the Apple platform that people may pay for just to be more exclusive. I think Leica wouldn't fair well as an android since Sony can't even break into that market with a premium phone, the growing market in android seems to be value, as many features as possible for as little money as possible, which makes sense since there's competition.

In 2015 DPReview reviewed my 1" sensor 20mp 4K "Leica" phone camera here:
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonic-lumix-dmc-cm1-camera-review

"With its impressive camera specification and unusual design the Panasonic Lumix DMC-CM1 is the closest thing we have seen to a true hybrid device and a unique product in the current marketplace."

Still going strong. Pun intended.

Good for them. I could see them designing aluminum bodies with decent camera setup, on par, with existing flagships. However, a technology (Canikon/ Sony/ Zeiss) company can take smartphone photography closer to larger cameras and there is still room for improvement even for sharing in social media. I would like to see new tech such as curved sensors.

Yawn. This is so boring. Smartphones are junk now. Anything 3 years old is same as newest, market is saturated. They really need this kind of stuff to go on selling overpriced silicium.

Can you imagine, LeicaPhone firmware updates 3monrhs After the event.. Leica Do Not and will never have the infrastructure...

Perhaps Herr Kaufmann took note of these developments:

https://m.dpreview.com/news/1485298834/red-patent-shows-insanely-modular-hydrogen-one-smartphone-plans

https://m.dpreview.com/news/8702161612/red-just-launched-a-1200-smartphone-with-a-5-7-holographic-display

He's right that there's a ton of room for innovation in creating some kind of a "ILC system phone" hybrid. Smartphones have the processing power, connectivity, and ubiquity, but they're kind of stuck in a rut using microscopic sensors and 200 year old optic designs. Meanwhile high-end cameras need to duplicate all of that processing power and display hardware for their focus, imaging, and user interfaces, and then put out some crappy apps... Wasteful, and all integration attempts to date have been half-hearted, sad, and buggy.

Lots of room for a revolution here, but Leica is clearly not the company to do it. They've got some strong engineers and a strong brand, but Kaufman's $5,000 Leica Phone will not be a hybrid system that will revolutionize anything...

At a time when the new iPhone is rumored to cost somewhere around $1400 and the luxury smartphone vendor Vertu just went belly up, you'd have to be highly tolerant of risk to even consider entering the market on the shaky premise that you can do something Samsung and Apple aren't already doing.

Of course there's no shortage of poseurs with money to blow, so who knows?

I won't have to worry at any rate, I already can't afford it :-)

..... they cant even put a viewfinder on half their cameras, hard to see that they are the people build the fabled great canera phone ....

What would Leica cellphone emphasis be? Image Quality? Cellphone quality?

I currently use the LG G5 with the camera module. It definitely improves camera experience with nicely located camera like 2 stage shutter button, separate movie button and zoom wheel and a contoured grip.
However in bright light outdoors, I can't see the manual shutter, iso and comp settings.
If a Leica smartphone can implement the traditional Leica features like knobs for Shutter, f stop and comp on phone body somewhere, then we have a real camera on the phone.
That's why people who can't afford a Leica love the Fuji 100 series with its easy know controls.

Because nobody has ever thought to make a phone with a camera emphasis yet...

/sarcasm

We've been down this road before, they don't sell well, and they disappear. The best you can do is develop a high quality competitor to the normal phone camera. As soon as you make a phone thicker and bulkier people will shy away.

The idea of a very expensive smartphone that's almost certainly going to be obsolete tech and/or broken after just a few years seems pretty dubious at best. Better to get a cheap smartphone and then by a really compact dedicated camera that will probably have better IQ and better controls than any smartphone camera... and still spend a fraction of the cost of what this thing is going to cost.

I tend to think that Leica is for folks who have money they need to see gone, but I can at least see some wisdom of things like lenses being a decent (relatively so) investment. Smartphones seem more like a disposable object so it seems like much less of a good idea to spend that kind of money on 'em.

I see his point: There are so many smartphones in the market, but none is pleasure to use as a photographer. Similar to the phones before iPhone announced - they all worked but awkwardly. I believe there is a chance here.

Oh nice...a rangefinder phone is on the way.

PANA-LEICA PHONE?

Panasonic did make a phone with a 1" sensor in it.
It may be time to put a 4/3 sensor in it.... Or not ..

Oh goody, a $3500 phone that takes pretty good pictures and has pretty good sound quality. But I'll be able to impress the rubes in P-Town with my Lecia branded phone...

Yawn...

Deal Leica: don't waste your time. You should spend your time testing new equipment *before* you ship it. You have *no* chance in the smartphone market unless you partner with Apple or Samsung. And, honestly, they don't need you. Stick to (return to) building high quality cameras. Please.

This is what Nikon and Canon also should do. It will be easy for Panasonic, cause they have a solid mobile phone background. They also have CM1 experience. I never use my phone to take photos, cause I think smartphone IQ is not there yet. But yet.
Beside that, it is not just about photography. It is also about compatibility. Samsung was the best at this.
As a side note;
like it or not, Iphone has the most realistic colors. Such a shame for imaging companies.

I hope they include a detachable EVF that bricks the camera/phone the first time you attach it.