Vivo’s X100 Pro offers another huge camera sensor for international audiences -Gudstory

Even in small smartphone cameras, lenses matter. Vivo seems to agree as the main emphasis is on lens improvements in its new flagship smartphones: Vivo X100 and Vivo X100 Pro. These were first launched in China on November 13, and now Vivo is releasing them internationally with a 6.78-inch 120Hz OLED screen.

The X100 will be available in Southeast Asian markets, including India and Indonesia, and the higher-end X100 Pro will also be available in European markets. And no surprise – the US isn’t getting any of these tools.

Like the X90 Pro before it, the X100 Pro has a 50-megapixel one-inch-type main camera – a huge sensor by smartphone standards. Vivo says it has been tuned with “Optical Precision Calibration” for “consistent sharpness and quality”. The X100 Pro’s 50-megapixel telephoto camera also gets 4.3x optical magnification, compared to 2x on the previous model. It comes with a new APO designation, which is Zeiss’s terminology for lenses designed to reduce chromatic aberrations. It also has a floating lens element – ​​which, no, there isn’t. Literally Float – To enable close-up photography with a tele lens.

The X100 has a more pedestrian 50-megapixel 1/1.49-inch-type main camera sensor, as well as a 64-megapixel 3x optical telephoto. There’s no floating element here, but the lenses on both devices have a Zeiss coating. Both phones have a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera as well as a secondary imaging chip, but the X100 is an older V2 while the Pro has the latest V3, which enables 4K cinematic portrait video.

Both the X100 and X100 Pro are built on MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 flagship chipset. Most other major series have smaller screens installed in “lesser” models. That’s not the case with Vivo – both use the same 6.78-inch OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate. They both come with IP68 rating for dust and water resistance. So the primary differences are the cameras which are detailed above.

Vivo’s X90 Pro showed a lot of promise when I tested its camera against the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra earlier this year. The company is sticking to the larger image sensor strategy, which has some benefits like better baseline noise performance and more natural Bokeh. But at the time, Samsung still held the lead in most situations with its more-pixels-is-better ethos and savvy computational processing. It’s nice to see that Vivo has doubled down on lens quality – in my tests, the X90 Pro showed some lens aberrations that ruined some of my images. In any case, it probably won’t be long before the X100 Pro and the seemingly imminent Galaxy S24 Ultra have a rematch.

Vivo declined to share European pricing information under the embargo, but said the X100 Pro will retail in Hong Kong for HK$7,998, which is equivalent to about €937 or $1,024. Meanwhile, the non-Pro X100 will be priced at HK$5,998 (about $768 / €702).