vivo X300 Pro The vivo X300 Pro has its flaws, but it makes a compelling case for being one of the best camera phones you can buy.
I love mobile cameras, and for the past year I’ve been enjoying taking snaps with the vivo X200 Pro. Between the fantastic camera zoom, variety of video capture options, and premium extras, there was a lot to like. The X200 Pro wasn’t perfect, though. A weird glare issue on the primary camera, along with plenty of bloat, a dearth of AI features, and a ho-hum update pledge sullied the otherwise great package.
Now, vivo has launched the X300 Pro, its next flagship phone for global markets. So does the new phone pick up the baton and run even faster, or does it stumble and fall in a heap? I took it for a spin for a few weeks to find out.
Is the vivo X300 Pro worth buying for the photos alone?
1x 85mm 1x 85mm 20x 7x macro 85mm portrait 1x 1x 1x with Positive Film style 85mm portrait with flash Ultrawide 1x 7x Selfie
The good news is that the X300 Pro generally takes high-quality images across the board. Much like the vivo X200 Pro, the 200MP 85mm periscope camera (f/2.67, Isocell HPB sensor) is my favorite shooter here. It captures sharp, detailed snaps while doing a good job of freezing moving subjects. And there’s always a snapshot mode if you’re shooting particularly fast-moving subjects. Image quality holds up well out to ~10x, but I also found that 20x shots weren’t always a complete waste of time. There is a clear lack of subject detail in many 20x snaps I took, but the clean lines, pleasantly shallow depth-of-field in some situations, accurate focusing, and mostly controlled contrast certainly helped a lot. You can always opt for the vivo X300 Pro’s fun external lens if you value higher quality long-range zoom.
The X300 Pro captures some detailed, full-resolution 200MP shots, and I’m glad to see the company has all but eliminated the splotchiness seen on previous X series phones, such as the X100 Ultra. It also tentatively looks like vivo has reduced blown highlights here compared to the X200 Pro, but shot-to-shot times still take around four seconds to process.
Okay, so you’ve got all those megapixels, but what can you do with them? In addition to full-resolution portraits and landscape/night mode snaps, vivo now offers a cloud-based AI Story feature, which effectively creates a two- or three-part “storyboard” out of a 200MP photo. I like the idea of harnessing all those megapixels to effectively get multiple photos from one snap, but this feature is highly dependent on the scene, and it sometimes highlights an arbitrary element in the scene or a subject that’s pretty blurry.
What about the other cameras? Well, the phone also has a 50MP LYT-828 main camera (1/1.28-inch) and a 50MP ultrawide lens (Isocell JN1). The 24mm main shooter is a little too wide for my liking after using the X200 Ultra and its 35mm primary camera, but it still captures photos with plenty of resolvable detail, wide dynamic range, and minimal noise. I’m also glad to report that the X200 Pro’s unsightly glare issue has been fixed on the X300 Pro. Thank goodness. Check out a comparison below.
vivo X200 Pro vivo X300 Pro
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