You can use smartphone cameras to shoot some stellar photos or videos – there are entire feature-length films that have been shot on smartphones. But there’s one thing you can’t typically do with a smartphone camera: change lenses.
That’s why most modern flagship phones (and some mid-range and budget models) have multiple cameras, each with its own lens to enable ultra-wide, telephoto, or macro photography. But Xiaomi’s new Modular Optical System could open the possibility of attaching a high-quality lens module to your phone when you need it and removing it when you don’t. If the platform takes off, it could also open the door to adding features that would otherwise be unavailable in a smartphone form factor.
Xiaomi’s not the only company toying with this idea. This week rival Chinese phone maker Realme introduced a concept phone with a 1 inch image sensor that isn’t designed to work with a built-in lens. Instead you can attach any camera lens that uses the Leica M Mount system to the back of the phone.
What makes Xiaomi’s system different is that it uses a proprietary system, for better or worse. Instead of covering an exposed image sensor, the removable camera lens clicks magnetically onto a circle on the back of the phone and uses pogo pins to draw power from the phone and Xiaomi’s “LaserLink” technology so that the phone sees the external lens as as built-in lens, allowing you to use it like any of the phone’s other cameras.
For now this is just a concept device, but Xiaomi brought prototypes to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. According to Wired and PetaPixel, the prototype uses a modified version of a Xiaomi 15 smartphone and a 35mm lens with a manual focus ring and adjustable aperture. The system has a 100MP Light Fusion X Micro Four Thirds sensor.
The result is a phone that could, at least theoretically, do a better job of taking long-exposure pictures or quick action shots than a typical smartphone.
One potential challenge? It’d be tricky to design a case for a phone that supports modular lenses like these. There would need to be a large cut-out for the camera lens, or the LaserLink and pogo pin features wouldn’t work properly. And that means there’s a big hole in the back of your smartphone case if you’re not using the removable lens.
Xiaomi isn’t the first company to develop a proprietary removable camera module for a smartphone. Almost a decade ago, Motorola briefly offered a $299 Hasselblad camera module for the Moto Z Play. And before that, Sony offered a line of camera lenses that could be clipped to the back of a phone.
Neither of those product lines have stood the test of time, so I’d be surprised if Xiaomi’s concept for a modular smartphone camera system fares much better. But it’s interesting to see a modern take on this idea at a time when built-in smartphone cameras have gotten much, much better… but still lag behind the kind of features you can get from larger, removable lenses.
