Legendary cinema company Arri has teamed up with smartphone maker Honor to bring Arri’s imaging science and video technology to Honor smartphones, including the upcoming Honor Robot Phone.
“This landmark partnership marks a significant step in extending established cinematic standards into the rapidly evolving world of mobile imaging,” Arri says. The cinema company adds that bringing its cinematic image quality and associated technology will help the next generation of content creators.
“Honor is pioneering a new era of mobile imaging, where technology exists to inspire creativity and storytelling,” says James Li, Honor’s CEO. “Arri has defined the visual language of cinema for generations. Through this collaboration, we are bringing those cinematic standards and professional workflows into mobile imaging, enabling creators to craft stories with greater authenticity and emotional depth.”
This collaboration makes a lot of sense from both sides. On the one hand, there was word last year that Arri was weighing its future and considering a potential sale. Later last year, the company shuttered a couple of facilities amid increasing challenges in a very competitive and difficult cinema landscape. Arri, an esteemed name in cinema’s rich history, has primarily focused on the extremely high-end, professional market with its cameras, lights, and associated products. That is a very tough market to survive.
Arri has already shown a willingness to pivot into more consumer-oriented segments, including with Arri Film Lab last November. This is a new OpenFX plugin for industry-standard video editing and color workflows that emulates the look of different popular film stocks. While it integrates natively with Arri cameras, Film Lab works with RGB images from any camera. It is an interesting way for Arri to market its celebrated image technology and processing to a new audience.
That is very similar in concept to what Arri is doing with Honor.
“Today, consumer smartphones have already become a serious tool in professional filmmaking, being used on blockbusters across the globe. That’s why we believe it is time to bring these worlds even closer together. For the first time ever, core elements of Arri Image Science are being integrated directly into a consumer device,” says David Bermbach, Managing Director at Arri.
Image science is not just a filter or a special post-processing effect, but how an image is created at the most basic sensor level. Arri is bringing its core cinematic imaging principles directly into Honor’s mobile imaging architecture, beginning with the Honor Robot Phone later this year.
“Smartphones operate under fundamentally different constraints: smaller sensors, highly integrated SoCs, different optical stacks, and different bandwidth limits. The challenge is not to replicate cinema hardware, but to translate the underlying principles into compact, real-time mobile architecture,” explains Dr. Benedikt von Lindeiner, Vice President at Arri and the person directly responsible for the new collaboration with Honor. “Our goal is to bring a true cinematic aesthetic to smartphone imaging — natural color, gentle highlight roll-off, and a sense of depth that feels authentic to how stories are meant to be seen. Creators should be able to move seamlessly from mobile capture into professional post-production workflows.”
Image credits: Arri, Honor
