Vivo X200 camera review

Vivo’s X-series of smartphones are the brand’s most expensive commercially available smartphones ever made. However, unlike many other flagships in the price segment, the X-series – while good at pretty much everything – has largely focused on one aspect – the camera performance. This year too, the Vivo X200 does just that.

From ZEISS optics to a dedicated image processing chip, the phone has it all. With the phone in our hands, we decided to take the camera out for a spin to one of Mumbai’s most vibrant and eventful locations – Juhu Beach. Here’s what we thought about the Vivo X200 cameras.

We started at around 4:00 PM, with a lot of light to spare, and shot some regular shots of the beach and the sand, before it got crowded. As expected, pictures carry a lot of detail as well as range. You can see several shades of blue in the ocean waves and feel the depth in the sand with the picture of the footprint.

However, the strength of the Vivo X200 is its portrait shots. The dedicated portrait mode in the camera app is decked with features, and shots ended up being some of the best portrait shots we’ve ever taken on a phone.

This included some fantastic edge detection, and very natural looking ‘Bokeh’ effect. There are also a number of cinematic filters which let you change how lighting and flare effects look on your photos. However, the execution is a little hit-or-miss, and things can go overboard sometimes. Check out the samples below.

This brings us to the front camera, which isn’t exactly a highlight of the phone, but managed to capture some great details and colours. In the samples below, you can easily spot the marks on my skin and some signs of dryness with a simple pinch-to-zoom right away.

Next, we really loved the new telephoto camera, which lets you quickly zoom into far-off subjects for a refined, more convincing zoomed-in picture. Check out the samples below, which include a plane flying in the distance, as well as literally the other end of the beach, where the infamous Juhu Beach crowd is starting to form.

The sun’s gone now, and it’s time to see how well the camera does in artificial, indoor lighting. We clicked some shots of famous beach street food items in all their mouth-watering glory. We were pleased to notice that a good combination of quick focusing, colour accuracy and details ensures these pictures look excellent, even without the natural lighting.

The dedicated macro mode, didn’t give us the best results, so we resorted to zooming in straight from the telephoto sensor which has 3x optical zoom and can go up to 100x in hybrid zoom. The results (as seen in this lemon slice) have better close-up details.

Heading back out towards the beach, we part our ways with the lights itself, and now rely completely on the little light that’s available from lamps and the moon. It is here that the camera slows down to capture more light, giving you pictures that look significantly better.

While they naturally don’t have the oomph that daylight shots do, they do more than just getting the job done. Look at some examples below that were shot with barely any good lighting.

However, portrait performance somehow managed to do well, even in questionable lighting. We went all out with some of the ZEISS filters also available here, and these are the results, where the edge detection remains superb despite the obvious lack of lighting.

We ended our trip with a few shots of the moon, which we took simply by pointing the camera to the sky, zooming in and pressing the shutter – no equipment required. We think they came out really well.

Unboxed Take: How good are the Vivo X200 cameras?

All in all, we loved the camera performance of the Vivo X200 in all these aspects. From well-lit areas to night skies, and from subjective portraits to vast landscapes, the Vivo X200 has the hardware-software combination to capture some professional looking shots easily and also packs enough tools for those who like tinkering with the settings before a shot.

We rate the phone’s cameras a solid 4/5, with the only aspect that could use more work is the low-light videography. We will go over the phone’s video abilities and more very soon our video review, so stay tuned to Unboxed by Croma for just that.