Huawei Launches an Entire Camera You Put On a Phone

Alongside a slate of new smartphones, Huawei today unveiled an add-on camera module. While companies like Vivo have Zeiss-made add-on teleconverter lenses, Huawei’s new Ruiying Z10 is an entire camera, complete with a 50-megapixel image sensor and zoom lens.

As reported by The Verge, the Huawei Ruiying Z10 features a large Type 1 RYYB image sensor behind a 24-240mm f/2-4.5 equivalent power zoom lens, which is actually a 9.1-91mm optic before the 2.6 times crop factor. The crop factor isn’t much different from the 2x crop factor of Micro Four Thirds cameras.

The add-on camera module relies on the attached phone for power and processing, but is otherwise a mostly self-contained camera unit. It works with two Huawei Mate 90 series devices: the Mate 90 Pro Max Collector’s Edition and the Mate 90 RS, the company’s flagship slab phone. PetaPixel will report on these phones separately as soon as possible. The Ruiying Z10 attaches to these phones using a screw-on mount system, similar to an interchangeable lens on a traditional digital camera. While it sits in front of the phone’s cameras, it does not rely on them at all.

The Ruiying Z10 is a very interesting approach to smartphone photography, effectively delivering a compact digicam experience, including the image quality, in a smartphone package. Obviously, the Z10 adds some serious size and weight to a smartphone, weighing nearly 350 grams by itself, but it is easy to detach, and it is not like the Mate 90 RS or Mate 90 Pro Max have bad built-in cameras — quite the contrary.

The Ruiying Z10 offers a relatively large image sensor and a full-blown lens, delivering image-quality benefits that even the best smartphone image processing can’t match. There is truly no substitute for a physically larger lens, especially for overall resolving power and depth of field. The 10x zoom lens also offers smooth, step-less focal length changes across its entire range, something built-in smartphone lenses cannot match. The lens has 19 elements across six groups.

Unsurprisingly, the Ruiying Z10 does not come cheap. After all, compared to a teleconverter lens, which is just optics, the Z10 has a full-blown imaging pipeline inside. The Ruiying Z10 is 5,999 RMB in China, which converts to nearly $900 at current exchange rates. That’s more than many new smartphones these days.

Image creditsHuawei