If you live in the US, among all phones that you can get officially straight from your carrier, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is your best bet when it comes to versatile camera performance.

However, on the global market, things are a little bit different, as we have a much wider variety of players that push camera photography up to eleven. once again in collaboration with photography legend Zeiss.

One of those is Vivo, which recently revealed its latest X300 Pro camera flagship, and it’s yet another all-out camera phone hailing straight from China that pushes the boundaries of what’s achievable on a mobile device yet again.

Just like the Vivo X200 Pro and Vivo X200 Ultra, this here Vivo X300 Pro combines exceptional hardware with great software to deliver what’s easily some of the best image quality you can get out of a phone in late 2025.

The main camera uses Sony’s latest LYT-828 sensor, which comes along with the new HF HDR feature (High Frequency HDR), which enables an astonishing 17 stops of dynamic range with low noise. It’s the same sensor that graces the main camera of the Oppo Find X9 Pro. Regardless, it’s still a very capable main camera.

The ultrawide and front cameras are also 50MP ones, and they both use Samsung sensors.

The true star of the show is the 200MP telephoto lens, of course. This one uses a Samsung HPB custom sensor built for the Vivo X300 Pro, and it’s one pretty impressive piece of engineering.

It delivers native 3.5X optical zoom at a fairly wide aperture of f/2.7, but most importantly, it has a massive size of 1/1.4-inch. This means that the sensor will deliver better sharpness and dynamic range when zooming in comparison with most cookie-cutter camera phones out there.

Quite the hardware selection, I might say, and it’s only enhanced by Vivo’s excellent color science and feature-rich camera app that is a joy to use.

Vivo X300 Pro Camera Score compared to its rivals

The Vivo X300 Pro achieves a little over 150 points in our camera test, which is a very respectable result. It fares very competitively against some of its big-name rivals on average, but when it comes to that zoom camera, it’s the Vivo X300 Pro that sits proudly at the top.

Main camera

The Vivo X300 Pro has a well-balanced main camera that produces images with awesome quality that boast very true-to-life colors. You won’t get unnaturally vivid scenes (unless you explicitly want to and enable the Vivid camera shooting mode), instead you get very realistic and appealing shots. Less is more.

Low-light image quality is great, too. We really like the fact that the Vivo doesn’t overexpose the whole scene in a quest to turn the night into day, but delivers a natural-looking nightscapes. That’s what we like to see.

Zoom quality

Zoom is where it’s at, and the Vivo has the best zoom of all phones we’ve tested. Yes, including the Huawei Pura 80 Ultra, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Xiaomi 15 Ultra, and the Oppo Find X8 Ultra!

Zoom shots taken with the Vivo are superb, with an excellent amount of detail at pretty much any zoom level, including 100X. Yes, in good lighting conditions when Vivo’s AI algorithms don’t kick in as much, photos taken at the far spectrum are more than usable. Colors are once again lovely, with minimal overprocessing or excessive HDR. Great to see!

Ultrawide camera

The ultrawide camera is extremely decent as well. The 50MP sensor outputs images with no loss of detail in the corners, little to no distortion, and the same lovely color palette that looks like something straight out of a DSLR. The only downside here is the slightly lower overall sharpness in the middle of the frame, where some finer details have fallen victim to oversharpening.

Selfie camera

The selfie camera is good. It carries just the right amount of detail from the real-world straight into a JPEG file. Dynamics are good; the color science is great here, too, delivering selfies that just look and feel right.

Video

Videos are decent on the Vivo X300 Pro but definitely among the weaker aspects of its camera. The dynamics are fine, but the phone sometimes struggles with extreme highlights or shadows. Details are great, especially on that zoom telephoto lens. It’s actually one of the best phones you can get if you want to take long zoom videos.

Conclusion

The Vivo X300 Pro is a phone with an excellent camera.

While it doesn’t really perform its very best in our test, it’s one of those rare instances where something is more than the sum of its parts.

The zoom camera is the true highlight here. Aside from being the perfect companion for taking long zooms as well as indulging in macro photography with the telephoto, which it’s particularly good at. Portraits are also pretty magical on the Vivo X300 Pro.

The rest of the cameras are just as good, rounding up one truly impressive camera system that always has the potential to surprise you.