Vivo X100 Pro Review: The King of Portrait Photography

Vivo has been successful with its popular camera and design-focused V series of smartphones. Its latest flagships, the X100 Series, benefit from a lot of camera R&D, which is now happening in India. The X series has been a game-changer for Vivo. These models may not sell in droves like iPhones,but they have reshaped the perception of the brand that was previously thought to be a cheap cousin of OnePlus and Oppo.

For the X series, Vivo forged a partnership with legendary German optics brand Carl Zeiss, and now the X100 line becomes the 5th product line in four years to benefit from that, centering it as one of the leaders in imaging.

In fact, with the X100 Pro’s pitch is not only that it is the best camera smartphone on the planet, and can even vanquish the likes of the iPhone 15 and Pixel 8, but also that it will hold its own against anything that 2024 brings forth.

Design 

By the looks of it, the Vivo X100 Pro is more of a camera than a smartphone. This is underpinned by the crescent moon-shaped radial camera bump that sticks out. The camera setup is the hero of this phone, but also in ways the villain.

It’s a massive module that incorporates a 1-inch type Sony IMX 989 sensor for the primary camera, an ultra-wide camera, and a massive 50-megapixel telephoto camera with a periscope. All of these have Zeiss optics with a coating that helps eliminate lens flare.

I tested the Asteroid Black variant, which has a sandstone-like look, but in reality, it feels as slippery as aquaplaning on an F1 track. This meant keeping the phone mostly in its rubbery case, which is thankfully part of the retail package.

Vivo does also sell an orange version of the phone with a rubberized finish, which not only looks more enticing but is grippier. Then there is the little fact that this is a massive phone; it’s pretty heavy at 225 grams and chunky at 9.1mm. For context, it is heavier than the iPhone 15 Pro Max. There is also IP68 water and dust resistance for good measure.

So the design isn’t all that practical, I’d say. I’m also disappointed by the curved-edge 6.78-inch LTPO OLED screen that kind of gives this phone 2021 vibes more so than something from 2024. 

The screen, however, is a very high-quality one. This is the nicest screen Vivo has ever used in a smartphone. It is capable of up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness but operationally, in daily use, I did find the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro to be easier to read in the daytime. Colours were fairly accurate and the screen was a delight to view content on.

I did feel the overall saturation level of the display was relatively low, which lessened the vibrance of the content viewed on it. Interaction with the screen was also impressive, as Vivo says it has greatly enhanced haptic feedback, which was almost on par with what one gets with Pixels, Samsung’s Galaxy S series, and OnePlus’s smartphones. 

The phone also has dual stereo speakers, which sound fairly crisp, but in terms of loudness, it is not on the same level as the latest iPhones or even the Galaxy S23 Ultra.

Performance

The Vivo X100 Pro is the first phone to be powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor, which will be the prime rival to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in this generation of flagship phones. In benchmark tests, this phone performs well. The best analogy I’d give is to compare it with the 2023 Ferrari F1 car, which is rapid in a single lap but starts losing its legs over the course of a race. The all-big core architecture has resulted in some aggressive throttling, which can be witnessed in the 3DMark benchmark.

In single-thread performance, usually, the Dimensity 9300 is up there with even the Apple A17 Pro, and blasts past it in multi-threaded scores. But the more you use the phone, the poorer the results are, which is indicative of thermal throttling.

In real-life usage, I never faced any issues. I could open more than 25 apps at the same time, thanks to the copious 16GB of DDR5T RAM, and data transfers were also rapid thanks to the 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage.

Games like Call Of Duty Mobile and FC 24 were visually engaging and touch control was precise. The graphical fidelity was on the same level as with the iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though the Immortalis G720 GPU is not on the same level as the latest GPUs by Apple and Qualcomm. Gaming may not be the strongest suit of the MediaTek platform, despite support for hardware-enabled ray tracing.

Imaging 

The star of the show, of course, is the triple camera system. The primary camera has a 50-megapixel 1-inch sensor with an f/1.78 aperture and an optically stabilised wide lens. Then there is a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera with an f/2.0 aperture and 115-degree field of view. But perhaps the hero of this triple camera array is the ½-inch 4.3x optical zoom periscope camera with a f/2.5 aperture at 100 mm focal length and stabilisation.

In simple words — this is the best still photography experience I’ve had on a smartphone. Period. It feels like using a rangefinder camera. Vivo had taken a select group of journalists to Hong Kong to experience the camera system of the X100 Pro, and its bustling and colourful streets came to life on this camera system. It blew away the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the Pixel 8 Pro in general photography. It was superior in low light and in normal conditions. It locked focus faster and also had shorter shutter lag while taking more cinematic, and often brighter and more vibrant photos.

The telephoto camera, in particular, felt magical. It not only doubles as a stunning macro camera but generally, it generates the best portrait mode experience on a smartphone. The subjects have a realistic depth fall-off thanks to Zeiss tuning the algorithms in conjunction with the lens and also the custom V3 chip, which is a companion on the X100 Pro on top of the Dimensity 9300.

Taking candid shots was a breeze. Zooming was also arguably the best I’ve used on a phone, despite just having 4.3x optical zoom which is less than what phones like the Galaxy S23 Ultra are capable of. Through a bit of AI and crafty optics, the X100 Pro takes better zoomed-in shots at 35x or 40x than the S23 Ultra. It also managed to beat the Pixel 8 Pro’s super-resolution zoom and generally managed to capture on-point shots of the moon and even sunrises and sunsets, which are generally very hard for a phone camera. This has been enabled by the new AOP coating on the lens.

There are a few new Zeiss camera lens simulations as well, and a new food mode that makes capturing your dinner a fun, really pro-grade experience.

Video also takes a huge leap with this phone. Apart from capturing standard 4K video at 60 frames per second better, the X100 Pro is now doing the best video bokeh of any Android phone. I’d go out on a limb and say now the X100 Pro comes very close to the Galaxy S23 Ultra in terms of low light video quality — though there is an inherent graininess in its footage. The iPhone 15 Pro Max remains the master of video for the time being, but Vivo is catching up fast.

Battery Life

All this mojo obviously needs a lot of power, and so there is a massive 5,400mAh battery, which is larger than what most 2023 flagships have. You get a 120W flash charger, but it can only charge this phone at 100 Watts, as Vivo executives claimed that once the battery size crosses the 5,000mAh threshold, they have to rein in the charging speed to avoid overheating the system. You can get a full charge in a cool 35 minutes at most. There is also 50 Watt wireless charging, which requires a proprietary charger.

Battery life overall is decent. I tested the phone in Delhi NCR and Hong Kong on the Jio and Airtel networks. I consistently clocked upwards of 6 hours of screen-on time, and I  usually only had to charge it once a day. Whenever I felt it gasping for some juice, the flash charger did its thing to quickly top it up.

I wouldn’t call this mind-blowing battery life. I have used phones like the Nothing Phone (2) which didn’t need to be charged for more than 30 hours. Similarly, the iPhone 15 Pro Max regularly outlasted the X100 Pro in my usage. 

I would call the battery life above average at best. Call quality was good in the Delhi NCR region on both Jio and Airtel networks.

One area in which  Vivo really needs to work a bit, if they aspire to convince people to buy their products at premium price points, is software. There are a lot of subtle new features in Funtouch OS 14 but it still feels dated. It also doesn’t help that tonnes of bloatware comes on the phone and I had to resort to installing the Pixel launcher. The one good thing is that Vivo promises four years of software updates and five years of security updates. 

Verdict

The X100 Pro without doubt is the best Android smartphone for photography enthusiasts right now. It takes dazzling photos that most people would expect from a rangefinder camera or something with a 50mm prime lens. While doing so it is also a mighty flagship grade smartphone in its own right. It is fabulously armed to the teeth. 

For people interested in the camera, considering this phone comes with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM at ₹89,999, the vivo X100 Pro is a steal. In a way, you get a better camera system and a fairly well matched device to an iPhone 15 Pro Max for almost half the price. 

If you’re not interested in its camera system, it would be a hard sell compared to something like an iPhone 15, Samsung Galaxy S23, and even the upcoming OnePlus 12. The brand isn’t very appetising to customers in the premium segment and this phone lacks polish in its software and design, which one would expect in this segment.