Amongst Panasonic’s big announcements the Photokina show in Germany came a whopper of a surprise. The Panasonic CM1 is a 4.7-inch Android smartphone with a 20-megapixel one-inch image sensor. This could be the best smartphone camera of all time.
It’s unclear whether the Panasonic CM1 is a trade show concept or a real camera that the company plans to actually produce, but it’s certainly a striking idea and design. It looks like the leather-clad retro-style camera that Panasonic has been popping out in recent years. In fact, it looks more like a camera than a phone.
Under the hood, it has a lot of power. The image sensor is the same size as the RX100’s beastly chip, which could give the CM1 image quality superior to anything we’ve ever seen before. Additionally, apparently the little camera can capture 4K video, which is impressive of basically any camera these days, let alone something this small.
Panasonic isn’t generally known as a phone manufacturer, but given current trends in photography it’s definitely a good idea for the company to get into the handset business to keep its imaging alive. The specs page produced by Panasonic certainly makes it look like we can expect a camera sometime in the future. We’ll keep you posted when we hear something concrete from the company. [Panasonic]