I’m a photographer and the new smartphone from Leica makes my iPhone look painfully boring
My iPhone is one of the best cameras I’ve ever owned, but it’s also incredibly boring compared to a Leica M11 – and that feeling has been made clear by the arrival of Leica’s new Leitz Phone 3, its third and most interesting smartphone yet to .
The appeal of the Leitz Phone 3 is, I admit, enhanced by the Leica red dot and the fact that it is also only available in Japan. This of course made me want it more, but even from a distance I can tell it’s packed with little details that make me wish smartphones weren’t all functional, gray rectangles that take technically ‘perfect’ photos.
For starters, there’s the design. The Leitz Phone 3 is likely a rebranded Sharp Aquos R8 Pro (another Japan-only phone), but it’s also the closest thing to a cross between a phone and a Leica M-series camera. Leica has given the phone a nice textured finish and, yes, a lens cap. It’s ridiculous, and I’d lose it in ten minutes – but it’s also a lot of fun.
On a more practical level, the Leitz Phone 3 also has many new software details. You get an exclusive Golden Hour widget that tells you when to run outside to take that landscape photo. As much as I love Photopills and its iPhone widget, Leica’s looks particularly stylish and it’s great that it’s built-in. The feature I really like the sound of is the lens simulations.
Glass master
The best and most interesting new feature of the Leitz Phone 3 is the virtual camera lenses in the Leitz Looks camera mode. These simulate the different aperture stops of three of Leica’s most popular lenses; the Noctilux-M 50 mm f/1.2, the Summilux-M 28 mm f/1.4 and Summilux-M 35 mm f/1.4.
The combined cost of these three lenses is $21,085 / £18,220 / AU$35,070. The Leitz Phone 3 has no hope of coming anywhere close to the image quality they can produce – the lenses are likely made mostly of plastic. But I find the concept of software simulated lenses fascinating, and it would be great to have the character of Leica-tuned bokeh and vignetting, plus color simulation, standard in my phone.
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It wasn’t long ago that smartphone portrait modes were an artifact-ridden nightmare, but according to Leica, the Leitz Phone 3 can simulate the look of those three classic lenses at any aperture stop, from f/1.2 to f/8. Film simulations, like those on Fujifilm cameras, are quite common now (in this phone they’re called Leica Tones), but software that can simulate the character of specific lenses is something else.
That doesn’t mean the Leitz Phone 3 is a replacement for an M11, but it does make it much more interesting than the Camera app on my iPhone.
What about the real cameras?
As you’d expect from a Leica-branded camera, the camera hardware itself is also quite strong – on paper.
Like the Leitz Phone 2, which was released in 2022, you get a main camera with a 47.2 MP 1-inch sensor that is paired with a 19mm f/1.9 lens. Hardware-wise, this is comparable to the 48 MP 1/1.28-inch sensor of the iPhone 15.
You also get a fairly standard 12.6MP front camera with an f/2.3 aperture, which isn’t much to write home about. But just like a ‘real’ camera you do get a microSD card slot to boost the 512GB built-in memory, and there’s also the rare addition of a headphone/microphone jack.
This is all supported by some other interesting software features. For the first time on a phone, the Leitz Phone 3 has a feature called ‘Leica Perspective Control’, which comes from the cameras. This is especially useful in architectural photography and ensures that buildings stand upright.
While it’s possible to do this in post-production in apps like Lightroom (or by using tilt-shift lenses, if you have them), the advantage of Leica’s software is that you can see where in the photo you want to focus. cropped to correct the vertical lines. It does this by combining gyroscopic measurements and algorithms, making it a useful feature that I don’t have on my iPhone (at least without third-party apps).
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 real photography tool with a distinctive character. But this also has major disadvantages.
Reality check
As with the Leica M11, I’m probably romanticizing the Leitz Phone 3 and overlooking the practical annoyances that, outside of photography, probably don’t make it a fun phone to live with.
It runs Android 14 and it’s not clear how many years of software updates it is likely to get. More importantly, it’s only available for purchase in Japan, and it seems unlikely to hit the market outside of that region, as neither the Leitz Phone 1 nor the 2 ever got an international release.
I’ve also never really been serious about getting a Sony Xperia 1 V (which new leaks suggest will soon have a Sony
The reality is that the iPhone 16 Pro, which I’m likely to upgrade to this year, will almost certainly be the Canon EOS R5 or Sony A7 IV of the phone world when it comes to smartphone photography. In other words: a solid, sensible choice – but I’m still glad phones like the Leitz Phone 3 exist and I hope more of them arrive outside Japan.