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We've got another Ultra on our hands, and this time it's from Vivo. The Vivo X300 Ultra is a flagship with a heavy emphasis on the cameras. But, do they have what it takes to make this Vivo the year's best camera phone? We have the global model here for review. So, let's run our test and see everything the X300 Ultra has to offer. This isn't the first Ultra to be produced by Vivo, but it is the first to be sold outside of China. The Vivo X300 Ultra packs a bunch of goodies you might want from a flagship, including the latest chipset, a large battery, and a high-res LTPO display. And of course, there's a cutting-edge set of cameras here to take on the best around.
The design of the X300 Ultra is typical for this sort of device. The huge round camera bump dominates the backside, and it has a grippy ring pattern around it. The flat back is made of glass, and you have an aluminum frame. Unlike what you see on some competitors and even other models from Vivo, there's no additional shortcut buttons or camera control key on this device. There is plenty of ingress protection, rated at IP68/IP69 against dust and water. On the front, the X300 Ultra has a high-res LTPO panel with a fast 144 Hz refresh rate.
This screen has the same specs as its rival, the Oppo Find X9 Ultra. It matches its competitor when it comes to brightness as well. We measured a maximum of over 1,900 nits in auto brightness mode, and over 3,300 nits when lighting up a smaller portion of the screen. The refresh rate here is extra adaptive and efficient to save power. However, in normal use, it won't go above 120 Hz. You can only achieve 144 Hz within a few supported gaming titles through a special frame interpolation menu. So, despite the impressive number, it's a narrow use case. That aside, content looks great on this panel. It's very sharp, and it supports
10-bit color depth, and HDR10+ and Dolby Vision video playback. And under the display sits an ultra-sonic fingerprint reader. It's super fast to set up and it's very quick and responsive, too. Moving on to the audio quality, in our testing, the X300 Ultra's stereo setup earned a loudness rating of very good. The sound is decent with good mids, but some distortion in the highs. You can listen for yourself through our comparison tool linked below. The Vivo X300 Ultra has an IR blaster, so you can use this phone to control appliances with. And the interface of the phone is Vivo's Origin OS 6, running on top of Android 16. It feels quite snappy and responsive with nice-looking icons, transitions,
and animations. One iOS-inspired feature is the Origin Island, a black area around the selfie cutout, which can hold a contextual info and shortcuts for things like timers and media players. One unique thing you can do here is drag and drop text or images to it to use in certain applications or save for later. You can manage the phone's connectivity and cross-device features through a hub called the Vivo Connection Center. Of course, you get AI-powered features, too, like a writing assistant in notes for proofreading, rewriting, and summarization.
And there's a universal document viewer with support for PDF and Word files, which also packs a set of AI functions. AI captions operates at a system level, enabling speech-to-text conversion, as well as real-time transcription and translation. There's a handful of AI-based photo editing tools in the gallery, as well. And for support, Vivo has promised plenty. Five major OS updates and 7 years of security patches. At the heart of the Vivo X300 Ultra is Qualcomm's current flagship chipset, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Looking at the benchmark scores, it comes as no surprise that this phone sits in the top performance bracket of current devices. The performance is excellent and would serve you well for gaming and intensive tasks.
Also, Vivo did a decent job when it comes to thermal management. We did see throttling at prolonged stress tests, but it wasn't too extreme. The Vivo X300 Ultra comes with a large 6,600 mA hour battery, and that's for all markets. In our battery life test, the Vivo earned an overall active use score of almost 16 hours. That is good, though some competitors these days do much better. The phone supports 100 W charging, and a charger does come in the box, except for units sold in Europe. With it, we were able to charge the phone from 0 to 66% in half an hour, and a full charge took 46 minutes. A decent speed, but nothing to write home about.
There's also support for 40 W wireless charging. And you get reverse charging as well, both wireless and wired. While some competitors have four cameras on the back, on the Vivo X300 Ultra, you get three. These include a 200 megapixel main camera, a 200 megapixel 3.7 times zoom, and a 50 megapixel ultra wide, all with autofocus. The main camera is a 35 mm lens, which is a staple in certain genres of photography, but has a tighter zoom than the usual 24 mm. To help compensate for that limitation, they've included a nice ultra wide with a larger than usual camera sensor.
Let's start off with the main cam though. During the day, it takes wonderful photos with likable vivid colors, good contrast, and excellent dynamic range. There's a natural background blur behind closer subjects, and detail is great in the default 12.5 megapixel mode. There's also a 25 megapixel shooting mode, which produces excellent detail. Shots of people come out with top-class detail and lively skin tones. The natural blur comes in handy here. In fact, we'd recommend sticking to that instead of using the dedicated portrait mode. For some reason, these photos come out softer.
Using a digital crop, two times zoom photos come out very good, as long as there's plenty of light. Now, onto the telephoto camera. It's native 3.7 times zoom photos are awesome, with again likable contrast and vivid colors. You get a shallow depth of field lending a natural blurred background. And the photos are super sharp at the default 12.5 megapixels. And shots of people with this camera come out wonderful as well. And even with a digital crop, 170 mm or 7.4 times zoomed images don't disappoint. And as the telephoto camera has a 15 cm focusing distance, you can use it to take some class-leading macro close-ups. Moving on to the ultra-wide, it takes excellent daylight photos with wide dynamic range and expressive colors.
Detail is top class, especially outdoors. And this ultra-wide gives you the option to crop in on the viewfinder at the touch of a button. It acts as an in-between step to compensate for the 35 mm lens on the main cam. And here are some selfies. They come out with great colors, wide dynamic range, and excellent sharpness. Except for an occasional soft patch on a face from time to time. We do appreciate the autofocus here. On to low-light shooting, and from the main cam we can't really find anything to complain about.
The photos are truly excellent, showing wide dynamic range, great colors, and top-class sharpness. The telephoto camera's native output is also praiseworthy. The photos have excellent sharpness, likable colors with reliable white balance, and wide dynamic range. The ultra-wide camera's low-light results are very good, too, with balanced exposures, wide dynamic range, vivid colors, and excellent detail. The X300 Ultra can record videos in up to 8K at 30fps with all the rear cameras. And it does 4K 120fps slow-mo as well. There's even a horizon leveling stabilization mode, like you get on the Samsung flagships. This one comes out lower res, though, at 1080p.
There's also an extensive pro video mode, which offers advanced monitoring tools. Also, log capture is available with a single pre-installed lookup table and the option to import custom ones. When it comes to the actual quality, the X300 Ultra's videos are a lot like what we've seen recently from other high-end phones. There's excellent dynamic range and contrast and good-looking colors, but the detail rendition leaves more to be desired with less than ideal sharpness across the board. Electronic stabilization does do an excellent job. The footage comes out super smooth without issues. And at night, the Vivo X300 Ultra does a solid job from all of its cameras when recording videos. The results aren't anything extraordinary though, just on
par with the other camera flagships out there. So, that was the Vivo X300 Ultra. As a flagship, it does a very good job overall, especially when it comes to the cameras. However, while it has good battery life, rivals like the Oppo Find X9 Ultra leave it in the dust endurance-wise. The cameras here are amazing, especially for shooting still photos. But somehow, the video sharpness left us wanting a bit more. It's something we also experienced with the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Another consideration is the price. This is one of the most expensive phones on the market. But you could get a gray import from China for half the price if you're willing to do some concessions with the
software experience. And the cameras on this phone might just be worth it. Thanks for watching, guys. Here are links to our reviews of the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Let us know what you think down below, and I'll see you on the next one.
