After using the vivo X300 Pro as my only camera on a recent trip to the Andalusia region in Spain, I walked away convinced that vivo has created one of this year’s strongest cameraphone contenders. While it may not introduce dramatic hardware leaps over its predecessors, the cumulative refinement across hardware, software, and accessories has resulted in a remarkably capable and versatile device.
Where it shined
Besides the great image quality of the photos I took, what stood out most in my time with the phone was the maturity of the camera software. The interface is well-organized and works fast, but it’s also feature-rich.
Beyond your usual color presets (the B&W here is great), you also get the additional option to offset the default brightness, saturation, contrast, and sharpness in whichever way you prefer. And these adjustments become your new defaults for Auto mode.
You can also tone down the HDR effect and get a more contrasty image, which appears more like coming out of a digital camera than a modern-day smartphone.
The Street photography mode is unique as it allows you to quickly put on your street photographer’s hat and capture fleeting moments of people minding their own business in the urban jungle.
Yours truly, minding my own business
Most importantly, however, I consistently got great exposures and auto focus with the vivo X300 Pro. The camera was especially good at recognizing people and pets in the scene and reliably focused on them automatically. And with the Smart Focus feature, a double-tap on the focused subject locks focus tracking on them as they move around.
The photo editing features are equally polished. The Gallery has a convenient button for extracting text from any image.
You also get the option of processing photos of documents, and even generating multi-page PDFs or PPT presentations from photos, which came in quite handy, as during the trip, I had to download a photographed document, sign it and turn it into a PDF to send back.
AI Eraser proved genuinely useful, especially for clearing distracting subjects in touristy places. Within the cleanup tools, my favorite was “Smart Circle”, which consistently produced cleaner reconstructions than “Remove People”, which was much faster in selecting multiple people at once but often left visible artifacts or pixelation in the cleared areas.
AI Eraser in action – see the full-res sample below
The Professional Camera grip was a game changer for the shooting experience as well. Once you get used to starting the camera with the shutter key on the grip, it provides an entirely different shooting experience. Its ergonomics allowed quick one-hand operation – drawing the phone out of the pocket, snapping a photo, and switching focal lengths with one hand felt noticeably more like using a compact camera than a phone.
I was also curious to try some of my camera filters, so for this trip, I even packed a 62mm UV filter and a circular polarizer (CIR-POL) to use with the screw-on mount of the photography case. When it was all stacked up, the setup made for a really impressive “camera-like” look.
Camera-like with stacked filters and my Samyang lens cap
Below, you will see plenty of camera photos. They all have the corresponding focal length in their descriptions, but if you are more used to zoom ratios, here is a cheat sheet for most of the focal lengths you will see.
- 15mm – Ultrawide cam (0.6x)
- 24mm – Main camera (1x)
- 36mm – Main camera (1.5x)
- 48mm – Main camera (2x)
- 85mm – Telephoto camera (3.5x)
- 121mm – Telephoto camera (5x)
- 135mm – Telephoto (Portrait mode preset)
- 242mm – Telephoto camera (10x)
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro (all duck photos shot in Portrait mode)
vivo X300 Pro
The great display on the X300 Pro was another aspect of the phone that aided the great camera experience. Visibility in harsh sunlight was excellent – bright enough that framing shots or reviewing images in the middle of the day was never an issue.
Reviewing captured images on the Vivo X300 Pro’s screen is a great experience
The panel’s colors are striking; saturation and contrast give photos a level of presence that my computer display simply doesn’t match. It made even average shots stand out.
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro (last image shot in Portrait mode)
vivo X300 Pro (last image shot in Portrait mode)
vivo X300 Pro
vivo X300 Pro
N.B. That last photo above was not taken in Spain but during the long layover in Malta on the way home.
And here are some videos shot in Seville.
Where it fell short
Battery endurance remained the main limiting factor in my experience with the X300 Pro. With maps, camera use, and intermittent social apps, the phone’s battery was completely drained by early afternoon. It performed no worse than other flagship phones I’ve used in the past, but it never felt reliable enough to go out for the day without packing a power bank or a fast charger at the very least. The grip’s supplemental battery helped, but it only postponed the inevitable recharging session by an extra hour or two.
Another thing was that, as much as I loved the speedy auto-focusing on people and pets, it did not work well with birds. The photos of ducks you may have seen above are just a select few keepers among many failed shots with missed focus.
And finally, I felt the experience of using the screw-on mount of the photography case with my filters was a mixed bag. The UV filter behaved as expected, as I merely relied on it to protect the camera lens, but the circular polarizer’s effect was far less pronounced than what I typically see on interchangeable-lens cameras – and it often did not span the entire image as it should.
This was probably the consequence of the phone lens placement – none of the three cameras was in the center, which is probably the sweet spot where the magic of the polarizing effect happens.
It seems the screw-on mount on the case will be most useful to videographers who may want to add an ND filter when the situation requires it, rather than to photogs.
Verdict
Despite these hiccups, the vivo X300 Pro delivered an impressively cohesive imaging experience, and it is probably my favorite cameraphone of the second half of the year.
Even without headline-making upgrades, its combination of high-end camera modules with the just right focal lengths, the refined software and processing, the optional camera accessories, and editing capabilities makes it one of the most dependable smartphone cameras available right now.
For users who prioritize mobile photography and want a device that feels purpose-built for it, the X300 Pro is well worth considering, despite its less-than-stellar battery life and limited market availability.
