When Huawei announced the Huawei P9 with its unique dual-camera made in partnership with Leica, there was a lot of justifiable interest. Leica’s name carries a lot of weight in the photography world and putting a Leica camera on a smartphone was a big deal. It’s just that Leica didn’t have as much to do with the Huawei P9’s camera as we were perhaps led to believe.
See also: High-end Leica camera confirmed for the Huawei P9
Huawei announced the P9 with a camera “co-engineered” with Leica. The German optics maker was given very prominent branding and stage-time at the launch event, to the extent that the other parts of the phone barely warranted a mention. But it turns out that the camera wasn’t actually made by Leica or even designed by Leica, but was instead just “certified by Leica”.
Mydrivers noted that the Huawei P9 camera was actually made by a Chinese company called Sunny Optical Technology. So far so standard. Many branded smartphone components are made by other companies. This is how Samsung, for example, ends up making Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 in its foundries: a company designs a product and gets another company to manufacture it. But this isn’t what happened with the Huawei P9 camera.
As Übergizmo later reported: “the Leica name on the back of the phone is simply just branding. It has recently been discovered and subsequently confirmed by Huawei that the the P9’s camera module had simply been certified by Leica, and that the German camera maker had no hand in developing or producing the camera or its optics.”
Now, this isn’t to say that the Huawei P9 has a bad camera. On the contrary, it is pretty darn great, and Sunny Optical is the world’s largest manufacturer of smartphone camera module components. But to make such a fuss about its “co-engineered” status does seem a little disingenuous. We’ve reached out to Huawei for further clarification on Leica’s involvement in the design and manufacturing process and will add any official comment to this story.
Apparently Leica did have a hand in co-engineering the “picture quality algorithm” used in the P9 camera software, but at this stage it sounds like Leica’s contribution to the P9’s hardware was more of a licensing and branding exercise than physical design and engineering. As always, it’s up to the individual consumer to decide if this is the natural state of business or they’ve been misled in some way.
Does this news bother you? Does it change your opinion on the Huawei P9 or do the results speak for themselves?
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