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, Realme GT 8 Pro. However, this is just the beginning of a 4-year long journey.
The Ricoh GR brand is the center of attention: this is a series used by, among others, the famous street photographer Daido Moriyama. It started as a film camera brand, then came digital models, and now it adorns a smartphone.
Realme GT 8 Pro and a Ricoh GR camera
Realme GT 8 Pro wants to be crowned “Best Street Snap Shooter”. It features a 50MP main camera with 1/1.56” sensor and f/1.8 7P lens with five layers of anti-reflection coating.
The main camera has dedicated modes for shooting at 28mm and 40mm, which are the classic GR focal lengths. They are paired with Ricoh GR mode which offers five GR-inspired profiles: positive film, negative film, high contrast black and white, 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 several movie-inspired looks
The 200MP telephoto lens 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 take photos from the far side of a stadium.
In addition to photography, the main camera and telephoto lens are designed for professional-level video recording with support for 4K video at 120 fps with Dolby Vision. Additional modes include Log 4K at 120fps at 10-bit and 8K at 30fps.
Realme GT 8 Pro aims to be the best phone for street photography
Branded GR, the Realme GT 8 Pro shows off its aspirations for street photography, however, the phone also offers a great option for landscape photography: the ultra-wide camera has been upgraded with a 50MP sensor and a 116° f/2.0 lens (up from the GT7 Pro’s 8MP 112° f/2.2 camera).
Realme and Ricoh say they have jointly developed a “customized full-chain system” for the camera, including the optical design, camera interface and color rendering. The phone takes advantage of the computing power available on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to do image processing and things like multi-frame blending for the 200MP camera for scenes with complex lighting and night shots.
The GT 8 Pro is just the beginning of Realme and Ricoh’s journey together – the two companies have a four-year deal, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it extended.
Realme GT8 Pro
We received a Realme GT 8 Pro for review and have already spent some time playing with the interchangeable camera bumps. We also took quite a few photos with the camera, including testing the GR mode. Of course, there is a lot of testing to do before we can talk about image quality.
Stay tuned for more information: The GT 8 Pro is already available in China and will expand to global markets next week.
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