The Ricoh GR-inspired Realme GT 8 Pro wants to be the best smartphone for street photography | Infinium-tech

A month ago, Realme and Ricoh announced the latest partnership between an aspiring smartphone brand and an established camera brand. And the first product they co-developed, the Realme GT 8 Pro, is already here. However, this is only the beginning of a 4-year journey.

The Ricoh GR brand is in focus – a series used by renowned street photographer Daido Moriyama, among others. It started as a film camera brand, then came digital models and now graces smartphones.

Realme GT8 Pro and a Ricoh GR camera

Realme GT 8 Pro wants to take the crown of “Best Street Snap Shooter”. It is equipped with a 50MP main camera with a 1/1.56” sensor and an f/1.8 7P lens with five layers of anti-reflective coating.

The main camera has dedicated modes for shooting at 28mm and 40mm, which are classic GR focal lengths. They are paired with Ricoh GR Mode that offers five GR-inspired profiles: Positive Film, Negative Film, High-Contrast B&W, Standard, and Monotone. You can customize the tone of each mode and apply GR-style watermarks to your shots.

GT8 Pro gets Ricoh GR mode with different film-inspired look

The 200MP telephoto camera also has a 1/1.56″ sensor. It has a 65mm lens for 3x optical zoom, 6x lossless zoom, and 12x digital zoom. On the shorter end, this camera is geared towards portrait photography. On the longer end, you can use it to capture photos of the stadium from a distance.

In addition to still photography, the main and telephoto cameras are built for pro-grade video recording with support for 4K 120fps video with Dolby Vision. Additional modes include 4K 120fps 10-bit log and 8K 30fps.

Realme GT 8 Pro wants to be the best phone for street photography

With the GR branding, the Realme GT8 Pro reflects its aspirations for street photography, however, the phone also offers a great option for landscape photography – the ultra-wide camera was upgraded to a 50MP sensor and 116° f/2.0 lens (compared to just an 8MP 112° f/2.2 camera on the GT7 Pro).

Realme and Ricoh say they have co-developed a “full-range optimized system” for the camera – including optical design, camera interface and color rendering. The phone takes advantage of the compute power available on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for things like image processing and multi-frame fusion for complex lit scenes and the 200MP camera for night shots.

The GT8 Pro is the start of Realme and Ricoh’s journey together – the two companies have signed a four-year deal and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it extend further.

realme gt8 pro

We received a Realme GT 8 Pro for review and we’ve already spent some time playing with the swappable camera bumps. We also took a lot of pictures with the camera, including trying out the GR mode. Of course, there’s still a lot of testing to be done before we can talk about image quality.

Stay tuned for more details – the GT8 Pro is already available in China and will expand to global markets next week.