vivo X200 Pro hands-on review

Camera hardware and samples

Except for the 50MP, f/2.0, 1/2.76", 15mm ultrawide unit and the 32MP f/2.0 selfie camera from last year, the X200 Pro has a revamped camera hardware.

Main camera samples

The main 50MP Sony LYT-818 sensor is the center of attention,. It's not as big as last year's 1-inch unit, but it gets pretty close - 1/1.28" with a wide f/1.57 aperture and 1.22µm pixels. The sensor has been co-developed with Sony, so it's technically a custom camera. Sony and vivo promise photo quality at the level of 1" sensors and even better video recording capabilities. The phone will take photos faster too, since it's not a 1-incher.

Telephoto camera samples

Telephoto macro samples

The telephoto camera is borrowed by the X100 Ultra - 200 MP, f/2.7, 85mm (periscope telephoto), 1/1.4", 0.56µm, multi-directional PDAF, OIS, 3.7x optical zoom, macro 2.7:1 scale. It's proved to be an excellent telephoto unit with excellent close-up capabilities. With the help of AI and post-processing trickery, vivo promises excellent hybrid zoom quality even beyond 30x magnification.

Ultrawide camera samples

Vivo has improved the portrait capabilities of the said camera by introducing 85mm and 135mm HD Portraits and Pro Sports Mode for capturing portraits of moving subjects. Shooting portrait videos is also possible with 4K HDR Cinematic Portrait video mode.

Selfie

Portraits

Speaking of videos, the X200 Pro can now do high-quality 4K 60fps, 10-bit Log videos.

The usual Zeiss-related features are still in place - T* Coating on the lenses. Additionally, the camera system supports Live Photos, the same ones iPhones support. In fact, vivo says they are supported by the iPhone native Gallery.

Early verdict

It seems like the vivo X200 Pro received some extra love this year. The company is introducing a substantial upgrade to the camera system with supporting software features, runs on an even more powerful chipset and gets some extra battery capacity.

If vivo is able to maintain a reasonable price point outside of China, it can easily become one of the hottest flagships, at least until the first half of next year. It also raises our expectations of the upcoming vivo X200 Ultra and gives fewer reasons to get the X100 Ultra from earlier this year. The X200 Pro gets pretty close to the X100 Ultra hardware and feature-wise.