Nokia’s making camera phones with lens experts Zeiss again, and we can’t wait

Why it matters to you

A great camera is one of the top reasons to buy a certain phone, and Nokia and Zeiss made amazing camera phones for years.

Nokia and optics expert Zeiss have announced an exclusive partnership deal that will see the once-legendary collaboration make a return to the world of smartphone photography. Specifically, it’s Nokia-owner HMD Global that has signed Zeiss up, and the pair will be working on new photographic systems for future Nokia smartphones. Additionally, the Zeiss brand name will feature on those devices worthy of its attention.

Don’t pass this off as a mere branding exercise, either. The long-term agreement will see HMD Global and Zeiss work together on all aspects of Nokia smartphone cameras. Zeiss will collaborate on camera optics, of course, but it will also assist with the software experience, services offered, and even the screen quality of the phone itself. It’s exclusive, too, so we won’t see Zeiss’s work on any other phones.

HMD Global’s CEO Arto Nummela is understandably excited about the potential. He says he’s aware we want more than just a great smartphone camera today, and expect “a complete imaging experience that doesn’t just set the standard but redefines it.” He promises the Zeiss partnership will help Nokia deliver this.

If you’re a relative newcomer to smartphones, and by this point are wondering what all the fuss is about, let us explain. There was a time when Nokia ruled smartphone cameras, and it did so with Zeiss (at the time under the Carl Zeiss brand name) optics. While the 2012 Nokia 808 PureView, or 2013 Lumia 1020 are probably the last Nokia camera phones with a Zeiss lens to wow smartphone photographers, the partnership extends back to 2005, and produced many other notable camera phones in Nokia’s highly regarded N Series, including the award-winning N95. At the time, there was nothing quite like the N95’s 5-megapixel, f/2.8 aperture camera; it was arguably the first “modern” camera phone, and extremely influential in the industry.

It’s not just this history that makes us excited to see the first devices from HMD Global and Zeiss. Huawei and Leica have shown how successful a camera-related partnership can be today, with the superb dual-lens camera on the Huawei P9, Huawei P10, and the Huawei Mate 9. We’re hopeful a Zeiss-equipped Nokia phone can meet the expectations many will have of it; there’s no news on when the first models will arrive, however.