The Xiaomi 'Leica M9' on Hachijojima
Out of Camera #13
Here’s my second Out of Camera on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra by Leica. Apologies for the lack of variety — there will be more to come very soon, with Mobile World Congress kicking off this weekend. But there’s just so much to unpack with this phone; it feels like several cameras in one.
To that end, I took it on a trip to the fairly remote island of Hachijojima this past weekend and shot exclusively in the Leica M9 mode. Hachijojima is technically part of Tokyo, but the nearly 200-mile journey involves a 10-hour overnight ferry. The island is famous for cows, scuba diving and a green plant called ashitaba that you will find in everything from pasta to bath bombs.
As a reminder, here’s the camera hardware on the 17 Ultra:
23mm-equivalent lens with a 50-megapixel 1” sensor and f/1.7 aperture
75-100mm-equivalent actual zoom lens with a 200-megapixel 1/1.4” sensor and f/2.4-3.0 aperture
14mm-equivalent ultrawide with a 50-megapixel 1/2.76” sensor and f/2.2 aperture
I usually shoot Xiaomi phones in Leica Authentic mode, but I was curious to try the M9 option on the 17 Ultra by Leica. Xiaomi says it uses a “RAW-to-RGB” image processing pipeline with a model trained on hundreds of thousands of photos captured by the Leica M9 rangefinder.
The M9 was Leica’s first full-frame digital M, representing a major breakthrough in 2009 after the controversial crop-sensor M8. The CCD sensor is indeed known for its distinctive color rendition, but I was a little sceptical of Xiaomi’s claims here.
You really need to shoot the M9 in RAW to get usable files, which means editing them to your taste. And that’s what I’ve always liked about the Leica Authentic mode — the JPEGs pretty much look like what I want without needing to edit them. So what exactly would this virtual M9 turn out?
For full 35mm-style effect, I decided to set the M9 mode to 3:2 aspect ratio, which remains oddly uncommon as an option on phone cameras. All of these images are unedited beyond some slight downsampling, because the M9 JPEGs are actually huge and often come in above this CMS’s 25MB limit.
