Vivo X100 Pro Review: A flagship with a photographic soul

Camera performance has been at the front and center of Vivo’s X series of phones. The series has been behind a number of innovations in smartphone photography, such as the Starry Mode in 2020 with the X50 Pro, which allowed us to take better pictures of stars without making them look artificial. The brand has also tied up with the legendary Zeiss optics, and the X90 Pro in 2023 was one of only two smartphones in the Indian market to boast a one-inch sensor.

The Vivo X100 Pro seeks to continue that innovative photography legacy. But in an era where all flagships boast excellent cameras, what can it bring to the phone photography table that is not just different but different enough to back a very premium price tag?

Vivo X100 Pro 5G design and appearance: Elegant, shiny premium looks

We live in a time where most flagships, whether they come from Samsung, OnePlus, Google, or Apple, look like carbon copies of their predecessors. Vivo, therefore, deserves some credit for making the Vivo X100 Pro 5G very different from the X90 Pro 5G. The front has a similar curved display, but the back has a much more prominent circular camera unit, which is in the center of the upper part of the back, and there is no steel band below it. That circular camera unit has grooves on its stainless steel borders in what Vivo calls the Sun Halo design. Corning Gorilla Glass Victus protects the lenses and has a tiny blue Zeiss logo in the middle. While the camera unit sticks out, it does so without looking like a sore thumb.

We got the Asteroid Black unit and its back glittered gently in the sunlight, giving the phone a very elegant look, although it is a little slippery to hold. Vivo has kept the sides of the phone curved, avoiding the straight sides trend that is dominating the phone zone. At 164.1 mm, this is a rather tall phone, and although it is reasonably slim at 8.9 mm, it is slightly on the heavy side at 221 grams. Interestingly, the display does not come with Gorilla Glass or any other branded protection, but the phone itself has an IP68 rating, which means it can actually survive being in the water for a while. All said and done, we think that the Vivo X100 Pro 5G is one of the most distinct-looking flagships of the year, and the black unit oozes understated elegance in the dark and shines like a diamond in the sunlight.

Vivo X100 Pro 5G spec sheet: A flagship, all right

The Vivo X100 Pro 5G ticks most flagship boxes. Its display is a 6.78-inch curved LTPO AMOLED one with 2800 x 1260 resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate, which adjusts according to the content being shown on the display. Some might have expected a quad HD (1440p) display at this price level, but we do not think that is a deal breaker, especially as the display is a vivid one and is exceptionally bright (it has a maximum brightness of 3000 nits!).

The phone is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor, which comfortably matches the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip and is one of the most powerful phone processors around. This is accompanied by 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512 GB of UFS 4.0 storage.

The phone also has three 50-megapixel cameras on the back, with the main camera being a one-inch sensor and a 32-megapixel camera in front for selfies. There are stereo speakers with support for Hi-Fi, and keeping things running for a long time is the task of a very large 5400 mAh battery, which supports 100W wired and 50W wireless charging, with a 120W charger in the box. Connectivity-wise you get infrared, NFC, Bluetooth 5.4, and of course, 5G. Running on top of this is Android 14 with Vivo’s FunTouch UI. As we said, in spec sheet terms, the Vivo X100 Pro 5G ticks most boxes.

Vivo X100 Pro 5G cameras: Main camera magic, telephoto camera sorcery

It looks great, and it ticks the right spec boxes, but as even a glance at the device will tell you, the cameras are what make the Vivo X100 Pro 5G special. On the back, the phone has three 50-megapixel cameras. But the megapixel count is the only thing they have in common. The main camera is a Zeiss one with a Sony IMX989 one-inch sensor with OIS, and it is accompanied by a 50-megapixel ultrawide camera and what we consider to be the real star of the camera show on the phone, a Zeiss APO floating telephoto camera with OIS. The cameras come with Zeiss T coating to cut down reflection, and the phone even has a special chip dedicated to imaging, the Vivo V3.

The main sensor delivers excellent images and videos, not only in good light conditions but in low light ones, too. You can choose the color signature of your pictures – Vivid will make colors pop. Textured is good for street photography and details, and if you want totally natural shots, there is Zeiss Natural. We used Zeiss Natural for most of our photography, and the results were right up there with the best in terms of realistic colors and lots of detail. But impressive though the main sensor is, it was the telephoto sensor that really captured our imagination. It not only let us get a very decent 4.3x optical zoom and even very good digital/hybrid 10x zoom but actually gave us the option of five focal lengths (24mm, 35 mm, 50 mm, 85 mm, and 100 mm) for shooting portraits, and even had a super macro mode, enabling it to act like a macro lens. And it turned in super impressive results as well, better than what one gets from the ultrawide which doubles up as a macro lens in most phones.

While the consistent main sensor is the base of the Vivo X100 Pro 5G’s photography pizza, the telephoto sensor is its crazy spicy topping. We found ourselves using it for just about everything – from zooming in to take pictures of birds and animals to taking portraits of friends (even at night, where the camera delivered very good results) to snapping the moon and stars.

The camera is an absolute delight to use for snapping sunsets and sunrises, and we even got very good pictures of the moon without using the Super Moon mode. This being a Vivo, there are stacks of shooting and editing options in there as well. In fact, we found ourselves hardly using the 50-megapixel ultrawide sensor, except when we wanted to capture a landscape. It is a very good camera, too, and thanks to its high megapixel count, you capture a fair deal of detail, but it gets overshadowed by its main and telephoto siblings.

The 32-megapixel camera on the front is surprisingly routine compared to all the brilliance on the phone’s back. It delivers very good, slightly smoothened selfies but does not really stand out from what we get on most flagships. It would be great if Vivo would bring some of those terrific V series selfie cameras to its flagship too. Video quality is excellent from all three sensors on the back, but we preferred using the main one as it delivered very good low-light results.

The main sensor of the Vivo X100 Pro and its telephoto are among the best we have seen on a phone. The former is wonderfully consistent, the latter consistently wonderful. Yes, they can comfortably be compared to the best of Apple, Samsung, and Google.

Vivo X100 Pro 5G performance: A gaming beast that’s a terrific daily driver

With the sort of hardware it has onboard, it is hardly surprising that the Vivo X100 Pro 5G cuts everything you throw at it like a steel sword through silk. The phone easily ran games like Call of Duty and Genshin Impact at maxed-out settings without dropping frames or heating up. The brilliant display is great for viewing content, and the high-quality speakers ensure that you get an immersive experience, whether you are wading through enemies in a zombie-killing game, just surfing the sand in Alto’s Odyssey, or watching your favorite series or film. The plentiful and speedy RAM and storage ensure that you can handle multiple tasks ranging from email, messaging, web browsing, and social networking with absolute ease. There is enough processing power to carry out detailed edits of videos and images.

Call quality is superb, and so is network connectivity, and the in-display fingerprint scanner works very swiftly. Vivo’s FunTouch interface seems a little crowded and has some bloatware (surprising to see in a flagship), although that can be uninstalled. The interface takes a little bit of getting used to, and some might find it intimidating, but there are a lot of useful features beneath that slightly busy surface. Best of all, it runs very smoothly, as does everything on the Vivo X100 Pro 5G.

Vivo X100 Pro 5G Battery and charging: Big battery, fast charge

The Vivo X100 Pro 5G comes with a 5400 mAh battery, which is one of the biggest we have seen on a flagship (most have 5000 mAh batteries, although the OnePlus 12 has a 5400 mAh battery too). It is not just a number monster – it actually got us through a day and a half of normal use, and normal use on the Vivo X100 Pro involves a lot of photography, which is generally a battery guzzler.

It comes with a 120W charger in the box, although the phone itself supports 100W charging. Vivo says it can get the phone from 0 to 50 percent battery in about 12 minutes, and this was largely accurate – we got it in about 12-16 minutes. The entire phone gets charged in about 35 minutes, which is, again, very good. The phone also comes with 50W wireless charging, but there are not too many wireless chargers of that speed around, so we could not test it.

Vivo X100 Pro 5G Price: As premium as it gets

The Vivo X100 Pro 5G is available in India in a single RAM and storage variant of 16 GB/ 512 GB, and it is priced at Rs 89,999. This might seem slightly above its predecessor, the Vivo X90 Pro, which had started at Rs 84,999, but is actually not quite so because the X90 Pro 5G came in a single 12 GB/ 256 GB RAM and storage variant.

Even so, the Vivo X100 Pro 5G comes with a price tag that is very premium indeed. And that puts it in competition against some very formidable devices, including the iPhone 15 Plus, which starts at Rs 84,900 and boasts a very consistent 84-megapixel main sensor, the Google Pixel 8, which comes laden with Google’s computational photography magic at Rs 74,999 and the recently launched Samsung Galaxy S24, which comes with very good cameras and the much-hyped Samsung Galaxy AI and starts at Rs 79,999. And, of course, those who want the name of a famous camera brand and flagship specs will also be tempted by the OnePlus 12 5G, which comes with cameras from Hasselblad and a price tag of Rs 64,999.

Vivo X100 Pro Review Verdict: Should you buy it? (YES, if you want amazing cameras)

The Vivo X100 Pro 5G faces a lot of flagship-level competition, but to its credit, it stands up to it very well indeed. In fact, if photography is a major criterion for your investing in a flagship phone, then the Vivo X100 Pro 5G is one of the finest devices out there in terms of sheer versatility. The phone delivers great images and very good videos and its innovative use of the telephoto sensor is rather unique at the time of writing. It might not have the smarts of a Galaxy S24 5G, the computational photography magic of a Pixel 8, or the Snappy Dragons of a OnePlus 12, but it definitely has one of the best main camera sensors and a crazy good telephoto camera, with a truckload of tricks up its camera sleeves. It is every inch a flagship in other regards as well, but hey, look at that back – this really is a flagship with a photographic soul.

In fact, it comes in the rare category of devices that can claim to be cameras as much as phones. And if that does not sum up the Vivo X100 Pro 5G, nothing will.

Buy Vivo X100 Pro 5G