Vivo X300 Ultra Review: A True Camera Flagship

I used the Vivo X300 Ultra as my daily driver for over two weeks, and it didn’t take very long to understand what this phone is about. The moment I started shooting photos and videos with it, I realised Vivo had once again built an absolute monster of a camera phone.

Over the last few years, Vivo has quietly become one of the biggest names in smartphone imaging. The company consistently proved it knows how to make camera-focused flagships that genuinely compete with the best. The only catch was that India usually got the standard and Pro variants of the X series, while the Ultra models stayed exclusive to China.

That changes this year. The X300 Ultra officially arrives in India alongside the X300 FE, joining a market already crowded with phones like the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra, with the Oppo Find X9 Ultra also around the corner. This means simply adding “Ultra” to a phone’s name isn’t enough anymore. Every brand is trying to build the ultimate flagship now.

That makes things even trickier for Vivo because at ₹1,59,999, the X300 Ultra is actually more expensive than both the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Galaxy S26 Ultra, two phones most buyers already associate with premium flagships.

So why would someone pick the X300 Ultra instead?

The answer is simple: the cameras.

Yes, it has all the usual flagship features too. But this phone is very clearly built around photography first. The real question is whether Vivo’s camera obsession is enough to justify the price tag.

Vivo X300 Ultra Cameras: Vivo’s best camera system yet?

It just makes sense to start with the cameras. Everything else about the X300 Ultra almost feels like it exists to support what Vivo is doing here.

It’s a ridiculously impressive setup. The phone packs a 200MP Sony LYT-901 main sensor with gimbal OIS, a 200MP Samsung ISOCELL HPB periscope telephoto with an 85mm focal length, f/2.7 aperture, OIS, and 3.7x optical zoom. The ultrawide is a 50MP Sony LYT-818 sensor with a 14mm focal length, 116-degree field of view, dual-pixel PDAF, and OIS. You also get a 50MP front camera with autofocus.

The main camera uses a large 1/1.12-inch sensor paired with a tighter 35mm focal length, rather than the usual 24mm most phones use. That changes the camera's feel quite a bit. Photos look more natural and cinematic, especially for portraits, street photography, and food shots.

Technically, Vivo has slightly narrowed the aperture this year to f/1.9, and the pixels are smaller too. But in real-world use, the huge sensor still captures excellent detail and strong dynamic range, and handles motion surprisingly well.

Vivo’s colour science remains one of my favourites in any smartphone right now. Photos have a clean, cinematic look without feeling aggressively sharpened or overly HDR-heavy. Vivo still enhances greens and reds slightly more than reality, but most of the time it actually makes photos look richer rather than fake.

The 85mm telephoto with gimbal OIS is probably the standout camera here. Zoom shots stay impressively detailed even at longer ranges, while Vivo’s stabilisation helps prevent shots from turning into a shaky mess.

I also genuinely enjoyed taking macro shots on this phone. Vivo lets you manually switch into a dedicated Super Macro mode, but honestly, I found myself using the 7.4x telephoto much more for close-up shots. It gives you crisper details, better subject separation, and lets you shoot tiny subjects from a more comfortable distance.

Portrait mode is excellent too, and this is where the Zeiss partnership actually feels meaningful instead of marketing fluff. Edge detection is clean, skin tones mostly look natural, and the background blur has a softness that feels much closer to a real camera lens.

The ultrawide camera is surprisingly impressive too. Vivo is using a massive 1/1.28-inch sensor here, which is larger than the ultrawide sensors on both the Galaxy S26 Ultra and Oppo Find X9 Ultra. And you can actually see the difference in the results.

Most ultrawide cameras feel noticeably weaker than the main sensor, but that’s not really the case here. Shots stay sharp, distortion is controlled well, and even low-light performance holds up far better than expected for an ultrawide camera.

The best part though is the consistency between cameras. Switching between the main, ultrawide, and telephoto rarely feels like you’re suddenly using completely different sensors. Colours and exposure remain surprisingly cohesive.

The only time I noticed differences was in lower light, where the ultrawide and telephoto become slightly more prone to motion blur with fast-moving subjects like pets or cars.

Video has clearly become a major focus this year too. The X300 Ultra supports 4K 120fps Dolby Vision recording across all rear cameras, while the front camera supports 4K 60fps Dolby Vision. There’s also 10-bit LOG recording, LUT support, and full manual controls in Pro Video mode.

Most users probably won’t touch half these features, but the fact they exist tells you exactly who Vivo is targeting with this phone.

The 50MP front camera is pretty great as well. Selfies come out sharp with good dynamic range and reliable skin tones. Vivo still adds a slightly warm tone to faces at times, but the results mostly look pleasing. Autofocus helps a lot, especially for group selfies and video recording. Portrait selfies also look clean, with natural-looking edge detection.

Vivo X300 Ultra Design: Big, premium, and camera-focused

The first thing you notice when you pick up the X300 Ultra is just how substantial it feels. This is a big phone, and with that absolutely humongous camera module sitting on the back, it does feel slightly top-heavy during one-handed use.

Thankfully, Vivo has still done a smart job with the ergonomics. The aluminium frame has softly bevelled edges, so it doesn’t dig into your hand the way some flat-edged flagships do. The matte-finished frame also helps with grip and fingerprints.

The back design is distinctive too. Vivo has gone with a two-tone glass finish that looks clean and premium without trying too hard. In this Victory Green colour, the upper half clearly leans into the camera-inspired aesthetic, while the lower section stays fairly minimal.

And yes, the camera module is massive. But because it’s centered, the phone surprisingly doesn’t wobble much on a table. One small annoyance, though: since the module sits quite low, your index finger naturally ends up brushing against the housing and occasionally the lenses while adjusting your grip.

You’re also getting an IP69 rating, meaning the phone can handle water submersion as well as high-pressure water jets.

Vivo X300 Ultra Display: One of the best smartphone screens

The Vivo X300 Ultra gets a 6.82-inch LTPO AMOLED panel with support for 1 billion colours, 144Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HDR Vivid, and 2160Hz PWM dimming.

Simply put, this is an excellent display. It looks incredibly sharp, colours feel rich without looking overprocessed, and the bezels are slim enough to make the front feel almost all display.

The adaptive LTPO refresh rate can scale between 1Hz and 144Hz depending on what you’re doing, helping the phone stay smooth while also managing battery efficiently.

Brightness is another major strength. With 1,800 nits HBM brightness and a peak brightness of 4500 nits, outdoor visibility is never really an issue.

One thing worth noting is that the phone doesn’t run at full QHD+ resolution out of the box. It dynamically balances resolution depending on usage, though honestly, the default mode already looks sharp enough for most people.

The ultrasonic fingerprint scanner also deserves praise. It’s fast, reliable, and positioned naturally.

Vivo X300 Ultra Performance: Flagship power without slowdowns

Under the hood, the X300 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which is basically the chipset you expect to see inside almost every serious Android flagship right now.

Paired with Vivo’s custom VS1+ imaging chip, the phone has an absurd amount of processing power available. It comes with 16GB LPDDR5X Ultra RAM and 512GB UFS 4.1 storage, so everything from app launches to file transfers feels ridiculously quick.

Benchmark scores back that up too. The phone scored over 3.8 million on AnTuTu, while Geekbench 6 returned 3595 in single-core and 10,302 in multi-core. Those are proper flagship numbers and translate into a phone that feels consistently fast no matter what you throw at it.

Gaming performance is solid as well. BGMI and COD: Mobile support 120fps gameplay, while Genshin Impact is capped at 60fps. Thermals are generally managed well too. During the demanding 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test, temperatures climbed from around 36°C to 51°C, which isn’t particularly surprising considering how brutal the benchmark is.

In regular usage, the phone mostly stays under control. It does get noticeably warm during extended camera usage outdoors, especially while recording high-resolution video, but Vivo’s large vapour chamber cooling system helps temperatures settle fairly quickly afterwards.

The speakers are excellent too. They get loud, remain clear at high volumes, and offer great stereo separation while gaming or watching videos.

Vivo X300 Ultra Battery Life: Big battery, fast charging

The X300 Ultra packs a huge 6600mAh battery, and thankfully, Vivo hasn’t built a camera monster that constantly lives next to a charger. Battery life here is genuinely dependable.

On lighter days with mostly messaging, browsing, music streaming, and some casual photography, the phone can comfortably spill into a second day. But even during heavier usage involving gaming, long camera sessions, and navigation, I never really found myself stressing about battery life before the end of the day.

That said, this is still a phone designed for power users, and once you start pushing all the high-end hardware simultaneously, the battery does begin to move. Shooting a lot of 4K video, especially at higher frame rates, using the camera outdoors at max brightness, or gaming for long stretches, definitely drains it faster.

What I like is that the battery performance feels predictable. Some flagship phones randomly nosedive once the camera gets involved, but the X300 Ultra remains fairly consistent even during intensive use.

Charging is predictably fast too. The phone supports 100W wired charging and 40W wireless charging, and with Vivo’s bundled adapter, the speeds are seriously quick for a battery this large. Around 20 minutes gets you close to 50%, while half an hour takes it comfortably past 70%. For a 6600mAh battery, that’s honestly kind of ridiculous.

Vivo X300 Ultra Software Experience: OriginOS 6 feels surprisingly refined

The X300 Ultra ships with OriginOS 6, based on Android 16, and at this point, Vivo’s software is genuinely hard to complain about.

What I like about OriginOS is that it manages to feel playful without becoming messy. There are layers of customisation everywhere, from lock screen layouts and icon styles to animations and multitasking tools, but the interface still feels organised instead of turning into a cluttered theme store.

Vivo has also done a decent job with practical smart features. Screen translation works surprisingly well, the recorder app’s transcription feature is genuinely useful during meetings or interviews, and the AI summaries save you from digging through long notes manually. Even the Origin Island feature, which initially sounds gimmicky, becomes genuinely convenient once you start dragging files, screenshots, and content between apps regularly.

The experience isn’t completely spotless, though. There are still a handful of pre-installed apps you’ll probably delete immediately, along with the occasional App Store notification that feels unnecessary on a phone positioned this high in the market.

On the plus side, Vivo is promising 5 years of Android updates and 7 years of security patches for the X300 Ultra, which is the kind of commitment you expect at this price point.

Vivo X300 Ultra Verdict: Built around the camera experience

The X300 Ultra isn't just another flagship trying to tick boxes with bigger numbers and AI buzzwords. Vivo has built a phone where the cameras genuinely feel like the centre of the entire experience. The consistency between lenses, the cinematic colour science, the ridiculously good telephoto system, and the sheer flexibility for both photography and video make this one of the most capable camera phones available right now.

The good part is that the rest of the phone doesn’t fall apart trying to support that ambition. The display is excellent, performance is absurdly fast, battery life is dependable, and OriginOS feels far more polished than older Vivo software ever did.

Of course, the X300 Ultra isn’t perfect. The gigantic camera module makes the phone feel heavy during daily use. I’m also not the biggest fan of the pre-installed bloatware, even if most of it can be removed. Sustained performance under very heavy workloads could also be better, especially during extended camera sessions outdoors.

Then there’s the price. At ₹1,59,999, it’s entering territory where buyers naturally start comparing it against the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Galaxy S26 Ultra. And that’s a difficult comparison, no matter how good your cameras are.

But if your priority is smartphone photography and videography above everything else, the X300 Ultra absolutely deserves to be in that conversation. In fact, it might just be Vivo’s best argument yet for why camera phones still matter in a world where every flagship claims to be “Ultra.”