A month ago, Realme and Ricoh announced the latest partnership between an aspiring smartphone brand and an iconic camera brand. And the first product co-developed by them is already here, the Realme GT 8 Pro. However, this is just the start of a 4-year journey.
The Ricoh GR brand is in focus – this is a series used by famous street photographer Daido Moriyama among others. It started as a film camera brand, then came digital models and now it adorns a smartphone.
The Realme GT 8 Pro and a Ricoh GR camera
The Realme GT 8 Pro wants to be crowned the “Best Street Snap Shooter”. It is equipped with a 50MP main camera with a 1/1.56” sensor and an f/1.8 7P lens with five layers of anti-reflective coating.
The main camera has dedicated modes for shooting at 28mm and 40mm, which are classic GR focal lengths. They are paired with a Ricoh GR Mode that offers five GR-inspired profiles: Positive Film, Negative Film, High-Contrast B&W, Standard and Monotone. You can customize the tone of each mode and apply a GR-style watermark to your shots.
The GT 8 Pro has a Ricoh GR Mode with different film-inspired looks
The 200MP telephoto camera also boasts a 1/1.56” sensor. It has a 65mm lens for 3x optical zoom, 6x lossless zoom and 12x digital zoom. At the shorter end, this camera is geared towards portrait photography. At the longer end, you can use it to snap photos from the far side of a stadium.
Besides still photography, the main and telephoto cameras are built for pro-grade video recording with support for 4K 120fps video with Dolby Vision. Additional modes include 4K 120fps 10-bit Log and 8K 30fps.
The Realme GT 8 Pro wants to be the best phone for street photography
With the GR branding, the Realme GT 8 Pro shows its aspirations for street photography, however, the phone also offers a great option for landscape photography – the ultra-wide camera was upgraded to a 50MP sensor and a 116° f/2.0 lens (compared to just an 8MP 112° f/2.2 camera on the GT7 Pro).
Realme and Ricoh say they co-developed a “full-chain customized system” for the camera – including the optical design, the camera interface and the color rendering. The phone leverages the compute power available on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to do image processing and things like multi-frame fusion for the 200MP camera for scenes with complex lighting and nighttime shots.
The GT 8 Pro is just the start of Realme’s and Ricoh’s journey together – the two companies have struck a deal for four years and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it extended.
Realme GT 8 Pro
We got a Realme GT 8 Pro in for review and we already spent some time playing with the swappable camera bumps. We also took quite a few photos with the camera, including trying out the GR Mode. Of course, there is a lot of testing to do before we can talk about the image quality.
Stay tuned for more – the GT 8 Pro is already available in China and it will expand to global markets next week.
