Canon could be the next camera company to team up with a smartphone brand

We’ve seen loads of camera companies team up with smartphone manufacturers in the last few years. More recently, Leica teamed up with Xiaomi, ZEISS partnered with vivo, and Hasselblad teamed up with OPPO and OnePlus.

Now, frequent tipster Digital Chat Station has claimed on Weibo that veteran camera maker Canon wants to team up with smartphone manufacturers.

There’s no word on a specific partner for Canon, although Xiaomi, vivo, OPPO, and OnePlus already have partnerships with camera-related companies. That leaves the likes of ASUS, Google, HONOR, HUAWEI, Motorola, Realme, and Samsung as theoretical candidates.

These partnerships often see the camera company contributing to image tuning, with some of the more ambitious deals also resulting in new software features and hardware (e.g. lenses).

So it’s clear that these deals can have wildly different results. For example, we thought the OnePlus 11‘s Hasselblad-branded cameras were disappointing in terms of color reproduction and low-light image quality. On the other end of the spectrum, we were really happy with the Leica-branded Xiaomi 13 Pro camera experience.

We hope any potential future partnership between Canon and a smartphone maker is more than just a branding exercise, then. It doesn’t sound like Android Authority readers are optimistic about these tie-ups though, as a 2022 poll found that just over half of respondents thought these partnerships don’t deliver better photos. A further ~30% felt that these deals only “sometimes” resulted in better images.