Xiaomi has officially revealed the new Xiaomi 12S Ultra, the first smartphone series bearing the Leica branding after the two companies announced their partnership a few months ago. The 12S Ultra includes Leica Summicron lenses and is compatible with Leica imaging profiles.

Xiaomi 12S Ultra

Xiaomi explains that the new smartphones were co-engineered with Leica and that the Xiaomi 12S Ultra comes with an 8P aspheric lens. The 8P aspheric lens has been designed to combat common photography issues such as flare, ghosting, and chromatic aberration.

Furthermore, the 12S Ultra is equipped with Sony’s huge IMX989 1-inch sensor and a Quad-Bayer pixel array with individual pixel sizes reaching 1.6μm. The picture quality will be reduced to 3.2μm though after pixel-binning. Xiaomi says that this will produce better low-light pictures.

The Xiaomi 12S Ultra is the first Android device that uses Dolby Vision HDR video recording and playback, which adds vibrant colours, a better contrast ratio, and richer details to videos. For ultra-stable performance, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra employs HyperOIS, which leverages the space between two frames to return the OIS motor back to its original position, giving each frame a full effective range of stabilisation.

The Xiaomi 12S Ultra touts a 6.73-inch AMOLED LTPO display from Samsung with a resolution of 3200 x 1440 and 120Hz adaptive refresh rate. The display also features 1500nits peak brightness and supports Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR10, and HLG standards.

Under the hood, there is also the new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, up to 12GB LPDDR5-6400 RAM and 512GB  UFS 3.1 internal storage. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra is also the first smartphone to feature Xiaomi’s Xiaomi Surge P1 and Xiaomi Surge G1, proprietary chipsets for fast charging and battery management, respectively.

Speaking of fast charging, the 12S Ultra comes with a 4,860mAh battery that supports 67W wired fast charging, 50W wireless fast charging and 10W reverse wireless charging. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra also comes with stereo speakers tuned by Harman Kardon that support Dolby Atmos. The smartphone is also rated IP68 water and dust resistant.

The Xiaomi 12S Ultra will be available exclusively in China, which is bad news for those interested in purchasing the device here in Malaysia. The 12S Ultra comes in three configurations; 8GB/256GB, 12GB/256GB and 12GB/512GB and retails for CNY5,999 (RM3,955.73), CNY6,499 (RM4,285.43) and CNY6,999 (RM4,615.13) respectively.