From last year's HUAWEI P9 to this year's HUAWEI P10, Huawei and Leica continued to upgrade their mobile photography technology to bring high-quality photography experience to consumers around the world. I don't know if the little friends are very curious about how Huawei and Leica come together. What happened in the process of cooperation, and what exactly did they break through? Today, this gentleman will expose the exclusive insider to everyone, satisfy the curiosity of curious babies, prepare to drive, and sit still!
Since the release of the first camera phone in Japan in November 2000, SHARP has become a way of life for the public. Every day, hundreds of millions of photos are uploaded to social networks for sharing. Most of the photos come from Mobile phone. Mobile phone photography has unique advantages, portable, always online, and ready to share. In the era of information explosion, the picture itself is the most effective delivery vehicle for multimedia information. People use their mobile phones to record every moment in their lives that is worthy of nostalgia. Therefore, the experience of mobile phone photography has become the most important competitive position in the mobile phone industry.
The most important evaluation standard for mobile phone photography is the quality of photos. The camera mechanism of the mobile phone is a reduced version of the digital camera. Although the physical size has natural constraints on the image quality of the mobile phone camera, the digital signal processing technology of the mobile phone has been greatly improved in recent years, so the mobile phone has greatly improved the digital signal processing capability. The image quality of the camera has also been rapidly improved, gradually replacing the status of the common portable digital camera, directly targeting the professional SLR and micro single camera. Relying on the powerful mobile phone processing capabilities, various manufacturers have demonstrated their ability in this field. For a time, large pixels, high resolution, various filters, optical image stabilization, self-timer beauty, super night scenes... At the same time, it also greatly enriched the consumer's photo experience.
Digital imaging technology is a process from photons to electrons to bits. The light passes through the optical lens to form the original digital signal on the photosensitive device, and through ISP (image signal processing) and post-processing algorithms, finally forms a picture that can be viewed and shared. If you want to stand out in the dazzling competition, you still have to trace the source. The most basic needs of consumers are outstanding image quality and a pleasant photo experience.
Traditional camera manufacturers, under the impact of digital technology, are also experiencing the process of extinction, integration, and ups and downs. Kodak, although inventing the world's first digital camera, but because of the transformation of the process of the existing film market has always had illusions, and finally bankrupt farewell to the market, became a memorable name in the history of photography.
But can traditional camera manufacturers' experience in optical design and image quality control be used on mobile phones? Can we copy the great photos of the film era and let the photos taken by the mobile phones also have "emotion" and "thought"? After some thinking, Huawei decided to communicate with the top companies in the industry. Its name is Leica.
01 Why is Leica?
In the eyes of photography enthusiasts, Leica is a legend of high mountains. Not only because Oscar Barnack handcrafted the first Leica prototype Ur-Leica with 35mm film in 1914, which is the prototype of modern portable cameras, but also because Leica cameras have maintained excellence for over a hundred years. The quality, how many photographers used Leica cameras to leave a precious moment, from Robert Kappa’s "Scrapping of Soldiers" to the "Victory Kiss" of Times Square, from the portrait of Premier Zhou Enlai’s bust to the fist of Ali Leica cameras have always faithfully recorded history.
The Leica camera has an excellent optical system. The production process of Leica lenses is very complicated. In addition to the unique ingredients, in order to balance the internal stress, it takes even several months to gradually reduce the temperature of the optical glass to the temperature at which it can be processed. Wetzlar, the small town where Leica is located, is known as the “Optical Silicon Valley†in Europe. Generations of optical experts are here to study and improve the design. The photos taken with the Leica camera are sharp, the colors are saturated, the atmosphere is calm, and the subject and the background have a detachable three-dimensional sense; because the resolution of the lens is high, the transition layer of the image is rich, and there is a special oily feeling.
After a hundred years of development, Leica has formed its unique product culture. Leica cameras never let the user down, every detail is honed to the extreme; Leica camera is a symbol of professional technology, a guarantee of artistic creation, an extension of the photographer's keen observation; of course, due to its high price, Leica is also Synonymous with luxury.
The use of Leica cameras is the pursuit of a taste, a culture, Leica is a camera made for a lifetime.
Steve Jobs said this at the iPhone 4 conference: There is no doubt that (iPhone 4) is the most sophisticated and beautiful product we have ever made, it is like a beautiful old Leica camera.
Huawei, as a young fast-rising consumer electronics brand will collide with the 100-year Leica?
02 The process of cooperation is like falling in love
The first visit to Leica was in the summer of 2014. As early as the end of 2013, Huawei communicated with the other party via email and expressed its willingness to cooperate. It was politely rejected by the other party. Later, after several emails, Leica finally got the same opinion.
The meeting started from the tour. In 2014, it was the 100th anniversary of Leica. The company also moved into the newly completed headquarters. Headquarters looks like a combination of "8" and "0" from the air, symbolizing Leica's two main businesses: telescopes and cameras.
The hall of the new headquarters in Leica is a small museum open to the public. There are exhibitions of photographers all year round. Here, I first watched Leica's full range of cameras at close range. The first time I found out, these "photos" It was taken with a Leica camera. It was also here. For the first time, I knew Leica M Monochrome, the famous digital camera that can only take black and white photos.
The first floor lobby is connected to the factory behind, and visitors can view the rear lens production and assembly line through glass windows. The strange thing is that there was no one in the factory when we visited. It turned out that the afternoon was the first game of the German team in the group stage. Everyone (except for the Leica party who wanted to meet us and the CEO of Leica) went home to watch the ball. Every time I talked to Leica’s friends about the scenes I met for the first time, I couldn’t help but laugh at them. I felt the enthusiasm of the German people for football and thought about it. At the time, they should feel like needles in the conference room.
The first time I met, the two sides introduced the situation of their respective companies. The CEO of Leica specially took 20 minutes to listen to our introduction. The two sides agreed to report the situation to the top and promote the next meeting.
The two-hour visit to Leica made me feel awkward. With hundreds of years of experience in creating high-quality images, consistently high-tech, exquisite craftsmanship and perfect details, focus on, focus on and pursue the ultimate corporate culture, how similar is Huawei's DNA? ! If Huawei terminal and Leica can cooperate in mobile phone camera technology, what kind of chemical reaction will it produce?
In fact, the interior of Leica is not quite calm. Although the annual sales are still growing steadily, although it still maintains a good profit, Leica’s executives are also thinking: Leica’s mission is to bring quality images to consumers, and more and more photo images come from Today, Leica also hopes to apply his centuries of accumulation on smartphones. To this end, he needs a strategic partner with a similar culture, vision, hard work, and ultimate technology.
So, Leica is looking for, Huawei is knocking on the door...?
A young high-tech company from China, with a typical German century-old store like Leica, has been successful in such a short period of time and it is very difficult to make a product launch. In the process, both sides have seen changes in the times. More and more photos come from mobile phones. This trend will change a lot of things. At the same time, everyone also sees that the two sides can work together, complement each other and form a unique combination advantage for consumption. Bring great value. The unification of the values ​​of both parties is very important. During the communication period, both Leica and Huawei have maintained good trust and communication. At the crucial moment of the negotiations, the Leica CEO flew from Germany to Shanghai, and the Huawei consumer business CEO finalized the details to speed up the negotiation process.
After several rounds of in-depth communication and evaluation, the high-level meeting between the two sides, to the end of the signing of a strategic cooperation contract, the two sides with a sincere cooperation attitude, across their familiar areas, to understand and respect each other's value. It is like falling in love, forming mutual understanding through communication, deepening trust on the basis of understanding, achieving respect, and finally finally holding hands, and it is a matter of course.
03 The darkest night of dawn
Achieving a cooperation agreement is only the first step of the Long March. The goal of both parties is to bring a new camera experience to the users through cooperation, so that the image quality of Huawei mobile phones has been substantially improved. From the very beginning, the two sides set up a technical expert group led by Dr. Weiler of Leica and Dr. Yi of Huawei terminal. The main work direction is optical design and image quality.
The mobile phone is small and complete. In addition to the smaller size, each part of the camera camera corresponds to a digital camera. However, the optical design of mobile phones has natural limitations: there is a gap between the optical quality of plastic lenses and optical lenses. Due to the limitation of size, the design experience of traditional optical lenses may not be fully inherited; the processing of lens modules is difficult and must be Consider the yield, mass production and cost of production.
Therefore, when Leica experts proposed the optical design indicators of the lens module, the challenge came to the fore:
Development 1 How to improve the yield of the lens module?
The design of the optical system is balanced in the high, medium and low frequency bands to ensure the quality of the details, levels and contours of the image. At the same time, Leica experts also put forward high requirements on the ghost and glare indicators of the lens. Ghosting and glare means that when there is strong light entering the lens, because there are multiple reflections between the lenses, a shadow like a gimmick (ghost) and a spot-like spot are formed in the field of view (glare) In most cases, the effects of ghosting and glare are minimized by the design of the optical system. When Leica introduced their test methods to Huawei experts and our suppliers, everyone was shocked. Because the Leica test ghost and glare source is equivalent to the projector's light source, it is dozens of times stronger than our usual test source, because only under such extreme strong light source, the lens can be completely exposed. Defects on glare. Leica insists on using the Leica lens test standard for cell phone lens testing because it is the basis for excellent images.
As mentioned earlier, it is possible to make a set of lenses that meet the requirements, but to meet the requirements and cost requirements of mass production, and to overcome greater engineering challenges.
The initial trial yield results are collapsing, similar to each of the 100 sets of lenses, and finally only 10 sets of qualified dual lens modules can be produced. Our optical technology team accepted this challenge. It turns out that Huawei's R&D people are uncompromising in the pursuit of the ultimate. In addition to focusing on solving technical problems, we also work with suppliers and Leica experts. Leica's expert team has repeatedly We visited the manufacturers together, discussed the improvement plan, and gave full play to their experience in the design and production of optical systems, how to adjust the shape and spacing of the lenses, and how to consider the influence of the peripheral system on the optical part. With everyone's efforts day and night, the yield is constantly improving, and finally reached the standard of mass production before the final deadline.
The P9/P9 Plus lens is a true Leica quality lens and belongs to the SUMMARIT series (aperture 2.2-2.5). You can try it out, take a photo with a mobile phone against a strong light source, you can find that there are very few ghosts and glare, the glow is soft, and a little adjustment, you can shoot a good "eat" works.
For each batch of shots during the trial production, a large number of samples should be taken for evaluation. On one occasion, Leica experts gave a welcoming evaluation result for a batch of comparison samples with a TOP brand mobile phone. Careful reading of his evaluation opinions, mainly to learn how to evaluate the optical quality from the sample from the perspective of experts; according to his point of view, the quality of the lens has reached the industry's first-class standards.
This email has greatly improved our team's confidence, but it also brought new concerns: after all, this is an expert's perspective. Many ordinary consumers will not look at a picture like this. How do we look at it from the consumer's point of view? To present a great photo?
Development 2 force a hole, only to show "color"
——How to take photos with “Lika Flavorâ€
Huawei's image quality experts first communicated with Leica experts, which was easy and enjoyable, because the test instruments and platforms used by both parties were identical in terms of objective evaluation of the images, which gave the communication a common language. . But soon we found that the test standards used by Leica were much higher! For example, the color card used to test color reproduction, we generally test to accurately restore dozens of color blocks is good, Leica's standard is the accurate restoration of 140 color blocks. To meet Leica's standards, higher requirements are placed on handset devices, ISP algorithms, and post-processing.
Image quality testing includes many dimensions such as color, focus, texture, noise, distortion, and dynamics. This is a comprehensive system engineering. At the same time, the evaluation of images is divided into objective and subjective parts. Objective indicators are quantifiable and repeatable, and subjective evaluations are mainly for representative scenarios. The R&D Multimedia Department has a dedicated image evaluation team. There are more than 100 representative fixed scenes, as well as random scenes. We invited many colleagues from the photography association to help us with the Beta test. They not only provided photos in various scenes, but also immediately reported a lot of technical problems and analyzed with our experts; they have superb photography skills, and Give us the first wonderful samples. The success of P9 photography has their important contribution!
The image assessment team not only takes a lot of samples every day, but also receives a large number of Beta test pictures and analyzes the problems. Several colleagues in the evaluation team worked almost day and night. No matter whether we sent back the problematic samples in the US or Europe, they could reply, clarify the problem and feedback the solution. Imagine that every day they are faced with overwhelming problems, and each problem must be tracked and implemented. This is a very difficult job! The multimedia image team, including optical design, algorithm design, and image quality, is a truly hard-working team!
I got the P9 prototype in January of 16 and started to try it out. I took the first photo with full expectation. After the playback, I was almost completely broken inside. Because I can't see the relationship between this picture and the famous Leica, the subsequent upgrades have been upgraded. By the World Communication Exhibition in February, I was confident enough to show the photos taken by P9. It is through such daily persistence and daily progress that the image of P9 moves closer to the "Leica quality" step by step.
Development 3, seeing the clouds, seeing the water
On April 6, 2016, Huawei Terminal held a P9 launch conference in London, which released P9/P9 Plus to more than 1,500 journalists from hundreds of media around the world, and the dual-lens camera system jointly developed by Leica became the largest conference. Highlights and concerns. At the press conference, we invited four top international photographers to show the photos they took with P9 and shared their experiences with P9.
On April 15th, in Shanghai, Huawei's consumer business CEO released P9 products to Chinese consumers. Leica's top management and CEO attended the conference and delivered a speech; more interestingly, two hours after the end of the conference, At 6 o'clock in the afternoon, P9 was simultaneously listed in the public channel retail stores nationwide. In the evening, WeChat and Weibo were screened by various P9 boot photos and test photos.
More and more friends around have been replaced by P9, and many new friends have been met through P9. P9 continues to surprise them:
Some friends found that the black and white mode of P9 is super cool, and the pure black and white photos taken are especially "Leica flavor". Of course, one of the P9's dual lenses is a pure black and white sensor, which not only bears the binocular depth map calculation, detail capture, auxiliary noise reduction, etc., but also can be used as a separate camera to shoot pure black and white photos. The calibration skills of Leica's 100-year black-and-white image are not only used on the Leica M Monochrome, but also on the P9.
Black and white photos are more humane, allowing the photographer to focus on the most basic image elements such as subject, line, outline, light, and light and dark transitions.
Some friends fell in love with the large aperture of the P9. The P9 can obtain the depth map of the image through dual lens and laser ranging, which makes it possible to adjust the focus and depth of field through the algorithm. Although it is an algorithm simulation, its delicate and soft focus blurring effect is a good example of the subject, which makes people love it and has an endless aftertaste.
Some Leica enthusiasts found that the overall control of the P9 has an inexplicable familiarity. This is because Huawei and Leica designers have designed the P9's operation and UI. Many of the control menus are the same as the Leica M series. The fonts are also the same as the Leica. It is the same, even the sound of pressing the shutter is adjusted according to the Leica M camera! It's no wonder that Leica's enthusiasts can get started with the P9's professional mode.
Not only the media, many consumers, Leica fans, there is a doubt, Leica products are positioned at high-end and even luxury goods, and Huawei is producing consumer-grade electronic products, why did they come together? Will there be a big conflict in the design concept? After the press conference of P9/P9 Plus, a reporter asked the CEO of Leica this question. He gave a very sincere interpretation: We believe that Huawei products have the quality of Premium, whether it is the choice of materials or the introduction of advanced technology, or It is Huawei's quality standards in software and hardware, all of which can reflect high-end quality and features. Therefore, we firmly trust the cooperation with Huawei, and we often want to convince Richard that Huawei wants to talk about its own standards outside, because many people in the world do not understand that Huawei has such high quality products. Leica is a 120-year-old brand, so we pay great attention to the high end of the brand. Moreover, we are also carefully selected when we choose our partners, so we choose Huawei as a long-term strategic partner in the field of smart terminals.
04 Summary: What did Huawei and Leica break through?
The original intention of Oscar Barnack to design the first Leica prototype was simply to satisfy his hobby of taking pictures, and to solve the embarrassment of the non-physical piggyback camera. He did not realize that the miniaturization of the camera brought a revolution in the history of photography. More and more people are taking miniaturized cameras to all corners of society, using their perspectives to observe and record the world. The content and subject matter of photography have been greatly expanded, and the cultural connotation of photography has also been greatly enhanced. Enhancement and enrichment.
Nowadays, the development of mobile photography has further lowered the threshold of photography. Almost everyone is using mobile phones to record and witness their lives at any time, to capture every moment they think is meaningful; these photos constitute the world in their eyes, Although chaotic but real; people are becoming more and more accustomed to using images as a third way of communicating and expressing themselves in addition to language and writing. All these massive, fragmented, grassroots images constitute a more diverse and rich record of the changes in the world's developmental society.
We are taking pictures with our mobile phones, and we are also recording history. Today’s shot is a part of history after a few years.
The cultural connotation of photography is once again facing tremendous changes. So mobile photography is no longer as simple as taking a good photo.
We have overcome so many difficulties and created the P9. It is just to make the color more realistic, the light and shadow more delicate, and the image more vivid. When the photographer sees these photos again, he can bring him back to the original scene and realize that The state of mind when the shutter is pressed.
Therefore, what Huawei and Leica really want to break through is not only technology, but the sublimation from mobile phone photography to mobile photography. It is a leap from image capture to emotional expression. The cooperation between Huawei and Leica brings users a video story with temperature. There are emotional self-expressions and emotional human interactions.
Providing users with high-quality products and resonating with users emotionally is always the goal and realm we pursue.
The future of Huawei mobile photography is worth looking forward to.
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