ZEISS headquarters tour: How Vivo brings 178 years of German optics onto its smartphones

Note: This feature was first published on 25 September 2024.

Smartphone makers partnering with various camera or optics brands isn’t new. Still, it’s not often that two companies with extremely different backgrounds come together to solve the smartphone imaging issues of today and tomorrow.

Vivo, which has partnered with ZEISS for its smartphone camera lenses since 2020, decided to show how involved ZEISS is with the brand’s V-series and X-series smartphones by simply shipping us off to Oberkochen (two hours away from Munich, Germany), where the ZEISS headquarters and the ZEISS Optic Museum are located.

178 years of history, expertise, and experience in a smartphone

There, we had a front-row seat to ZEISS’s 178 years of optics history, a glimpse of one of its last handmade products (Cine Lenses production tour), and a quick behind-the-scenes look at how smartphone photography is tested in their labs.

The tour was a necessary staging ground to help visitors understand the most challenging steps in ZEISS’s and Vivo’s collaboration. Everything we saw up until the smartphone camera testing room was an introduction to the beauty and limitation of lenses, how every ZEISS product (from its microscopes to its prosumer camera lens range) uses precise measurements and anti-reflective coating to achieve the “ZEISS Look” (which, according to ZEISS, was a term they heard, not invented). 

While ZEISS is not new to the smartphone collaboration scene, user demand and expectations have changed significantly when comparing phone camera technologies pre- and post-COVID. Among the many hygiene factor tests for colour, aberration, and sharpness, as seen in its smartphone camera testing room, ZEISS added several new tests to satisfy the increasing user demands in smartphone photography. 

Two tests are specific to the Vivo V40 Pro: one measuring the AutoFocus delay (in milliseconds) before hitting the shutter and another testing the seven types of ZEISS-stylised bokeh found as filters inside the phone.

However, the biggest lesson in ZEISS’s headquarters wasn’t the stringent tests, rich history, or the Hollywood worship of its best-in-class lenses. It was to fully understand that all these can be recreated at a smartphone level if the optics and phone brands chose the correct partner.

How deep is the ZEISS collaboration on Vivo phones?

Vivo and ZEISS held a joint presentation and panel discussion on their combined approach towards bringing the quality of ZEISS lenses onto the best-fit Vivo phones.

For example, it was decided early on that Vivo’s X-series (such as the Vivo X100 Pro) catered to users who needed more comprehensive, professional shooting. At the same time, the V-series (like the Vivo V40 Pro) targeted the mass market, with a heavy focus on portrait photography. 

For Vivo's phones, ZEISS boiled down the “ZEISS Look” to three tenets of photography basics. The first is colour, where our biological sensitivity towards colours is correctly represented when digitised. Next is sharpness, which evokes the sense of seeing high-contrast textures (like sand) being of utmost importance next to colour. The last, however, is achieving a “3D pop” that makes use of the first two tenets, but employs natural-looking background bokeh with foreground sharpness to deliver on its ultimate ZEISS Look.

The real challenge, however, was replicating all of that at a smartphone level. Every change in material (glass, plastic, or metal) can affect the cost of production, but more crucial was the change in materials, removing certain flaws (like chromatic aberration) that may introduce other deficiencies down the road. 

To counteract that, ZEISS and Vivo use digital twins to create lenses, light, and physics simulations, cutting on development and prototyping time and effort. Any changes specified by Vivo, the digital twin tells them what to expect.

ZEISS said it draws no hard lines in hardware or software when asked. Its priority for Vivo’s phones is to capture the maximum amount of image data through the sensor. Sometimes, there are constraints (like cost or materials), and software is applied correctively to help maximise the same image information once again. Only then does ZEISS consider enhancement through software.

Vivo and ZEISS said that there are multiple teams with a weekly tech call and meeting across timezones, where Vivo shares their product roadmap and ZEISS comes in to advise on trends and user preferences, on top of sharing the progress in adding new lenses to their next phone.

What’s the future of Vivo and ZEISS?

As far as Vivo and ZEISS were willing to share, the future holds only mysteries, and it’s in the best interest of both companies to be prepared for what’s to come.

“I see it as an opportunity”, said Sebastian Döntgen, Head of Product Management and member of the Management Board for Consumer Products at ZEISS Group, when asked about whether ZEISS and Vivo are ready to take on the challenges generative AI poses to the photography industry. “Generative AI will enable new use cases, help reflect new kinds of creativity, and help users open up more possibilities,” said Sebastian during the discussion panel.

“Naturally, it (Gen AI) opens up to more fussy interpretations of what is real,” said Oliver Schindelbeck, Senior Smartphone Technology Manager at ZEISS Consumer Products. “But, the history of photography has shown that photography is an interpretation of the scene, the light… and we use many editing tools in today’s photography as well. So, we think generative AI will be able to help users better achieve their interpretation of photography”.

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