The Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica Edition might offer a stunning rotating bezel for tactile zoom

We are super close to the Xiaomi 17 Ultra unveiling – it's supposed to happen on December 25 – but here's a riveting last-minute detail.

The company teases a Leica Edition of the Xiaomi 17 Ultra – and there's an alleged rotating bezel on that thing!

Tactile zoom

If you've grown accustomed to dedicated cameras like DSLRs, the transition to operating a phone's camera through the touchscreen could be a painful one.

Some phones nowadays (like the iPhone 17, for example) feature a Camera Control button on the side, but what the Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leica Edition promises could be a more natural way to handle the zoom.

The official Xiaomi account on Weibo (an extremely popular Chinese social media platform) posted a video teaser, where we can see a rotating bezel on the camera island. The caption is "Master Zoom Ring", so it's not exactly hard to guess what it's for.

What about the standard model?

The standard Xiaomi 17 Ultra keeps the same rounded camera layout as the Leitz Edition but skips the rotating camera mechanism. Another clear visual difference is branding. The regular model has the word "Ultra" on the back, while the Leica Edition replaces that text with Leica's legendary red dot logo.

Xiaomi puts strong emphasis on the telephoto camera in the 17 Ultra. Early information suggests this model introduces several Leica-certified firsts, including a very large telephoto sensor and an APO-certified lens.

APO basically means the lens tries very hard to keep all colors behaving themselves. In normal lenses, colors focus in slightly different places, which leads to those annoying blurry edges, like the photo is quietly falling apart. An APO lens uses special glass to force every color to meet at the same point, creating sharper images with clean edges, especially when zooming far away.

The main camera uses a 50MP 1-inch sensor aimed at strong low-light and dynamic range performance, as already seen in preliminary sample shots. It is paired with a 200MP periscope zoom camera and a 50MP ultra-wide lens, rounding out a camera setup focused on versatility and high-end photography.