HONOR has entered into a collaboration with ARRI, the world renowned designer and manufacturer of professional cinema cameras.
The partnership brings together HONOR’s mobile imaging technology and ARRI’s century long expertise in cinematic image quality. The collaboration aims to expand creative possibilities and bring cinema level visual standards from high end filmmaking to 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, CEO of HONOR.
“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.”
For more than a century, ARRI has helped shape how cinematic stories are told, from the early days of film to today’s advanced digital camera systems. This work has been recognized with 20 Scientific and Technical Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“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.
In cinema, image science is not simply a filter or effect. It is the foundation of how an image is created, shaping how colors look, how highlights and shadows are rendered, and how images remain consistent from capture to final screen.
Through this collaboration, HONOR is applying ARRI’s image science principles to its mobile imaging system.
“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 architectures,” says Dr. Benedikt von Lindeiner, Vice President at ARRI and responsible for the technical 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.”
The first results of this collaboration will debut in the upcoming HONOR ROBOT PHONE later this year.