Vivo X300 Ultra review: A calibration, a new playbook, and questions to ponder

THis testament be the number one clip Vivo’s ‘Ultra’ flagship speech sound graces the amerind market. The X100 Ultra never made it here, and neither did the X200 Ultra last year. About time. There were understandable business considerations at the time, including currency valuations, questions about demand versus shipments making financial sense, and an ecosystem of lenses that wasn’t as matured as it hopefully is now. Third time lucky, with Vivo’s third generation ‘Ultra’ flagship. The X300 Ultra joins existing ultra-flagship competition from Samsung and Xiaomi, who have for different stretches of time, already figured the specifics (and courage) to sell their Ultra flagships in this market. But there’s a set of relevant questions you must answer.The Vivo X300 Ultra is priced at ₹1,59,999 and expectedly sits at the top of Vivo’s smartphone portfolio, effectively taking over the flagship mantle from the impressive X300 Pro. But then again, Ultra is greater than Pro, in any scheme of things. There’s the X300 Ultra, followed by X300 Pro (that’s around ₹1,09,999), the X300 (around ₹75,999) and the X Fold5 ( ₹1,49,999) over to one side. The fact that the X300 Ultra will be joined by the X300 FE ( ₹79,999 onwards), which we will analyse separately (my feeling is, its relevance is much higher, particularly when pricing is considered), strengthens Vivo’s flagship portfolio. Competition is tough, with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Xiaomi 17 Ultra, both priced ₹1,39,999 onwards, and the latter taking advantage of the Leica camera co-partnership.There is also a perspective of the lens at play. The Vivo X300 Ultra can be purchased with the Photography Kit for ₹2,09,999—this includes a Telephoto Extender Gen 2, a Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra and an Imaging Grip Kit. Each of these can be purchased separately as well, and that’s what I would recommend. The 400mm Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra lens makes the most sense, if you’re comfortable carrying it around, and it will cost you around ₹27,999. The 200mm Telephoto Extender Gen 2 costs ₹15,999.Photography, as the start pointThe Vivo X300 Ultra conversation must be approached with the camera and photography proposition before anything else. A true Zeiss influence is visible from the outset for this triple camera setup that has a 200-megapixel wide camera, a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto camera (this is a key detail, for the lens accessories) and a 50-megapixel ultra wide which absolutely isn’t a weak(er) link if that’s what you assumed looking at the megapixel numbers. The impact that Vivo and Zeiss are going for here is the focal length choice.The camera app, by default will unlock the 14mm, 35mm and 85mm focal lengths, with the latter particularly taking advantage of Vivo’s constantly benchmark setting image stabilisation tech. That’s before the lens Telephoto Extender Gen 2 and the Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra unlock 200mm and 400mm equivalent focal lengths. I’ll get to these lenses in a moment, because they deserve their own moment in the spotlight. That said, remember the question I teased earlier in this piece? What you need to decide is whether a large lens attachment with a phone (that too will have a thick mounting capable case snapped on) is cumbersome or convenient in your book? I know my answer, and you certainly may not agree.That said, it is important to note Vivo and Zeiss’ fantastic work with the X300 Ultra’s cameras. As a starting point, the hardware in play is top notch. It’s a troika at the back, with a 200-megapixel LYTIA 901 sensor, a 50-megapixel ultra-wide LYT818 sensor and a 200-megapixel telephoto sensor. Interestingly, Vivo has again pushed the envelope with optical image stabilisation across all three lens here—the primary wide is CIPA 6.0 standard, the ultra-wide is CIPA 6.5 and the telephoto considering its unique demands adheres to the CIPA 7.0 standard.Not to get confused between specs and standards, you will not get a better stabilised smartphone for moving shots and action photography, than the Vivo X300 Ultra, at this time—everyone in the Ultra bracket around it too leaves absolutely no complaints on that front either. That’s just how good Vivo and Zeiss’ stabilisation tech is.The Camera and Imaging Products Association, or CIPA, is a Japan-based international trade body that maintains the CIPA standard. The CIPA 7.0 stabilisation standard is the latest at this time, and the Vivo X300 Ultra is the first in the Indian market to tick off this tech. The Huawei Pura 90 Pro Max is the other, though it isn’t sold on these shores. What is immediately clear, and I say this as someone who has experienced previous X series flagships extensively, is a new image processing pipeline that has significantly enhanced colours, telephoto shots are a smidgen sharper and there is better dynamic range to photos particularly shot in complicated lighting scenarios.The telephoto, and the AIThink of the Vivo X300 Ultra as a full fledged camera, particularly if you get the telescope lens proposition, and a phone bolted on for good measure. What I do miss is an option to turn of AI image processing completely (when using the X300 Ultra camera with or without the Telephoto Extender Gen 2 attachments), something the Xiaomi 17 Ultra gives as an option in case non-processed realism is something you’d prefer. I say this, because there are instances at 800mm zoom and beyond, and if the frame is complex, the AI processing becomes a tad too apparent.There is a nice balance to how colours are tuned, with a very perceptible richness to most photos, without any hints of over saturation or unnatural hues. This is true, as you’d expect an ‘Ultra phone’ to be, across daytime and low light photos. If you thought Vivo’s X300 Pro was the company’s best camera effort till now, this sets a new reality to work with. Little details elsewhere matter too, such as 4K60fps video recording on all rear cameras, as well as the front camera.My favourite is the new Refined photography mode, followed by Zeiss (Natural)—the former absolutely gets the exposure and colours spot on as the human eye saw the frame, and the latter is ideal if you prefer exposure that is a notch higher without ruining the colours.That said, Vivo needs to get some work done on the camera app, which is a confusing mash of zoom levels in “X” and focal length in “mm” measurements. And to be fair, most users would be more comfortable with the X numbers instead. The primary lens on the Vivo X300 Ultra replicates a 35mm field of view, whereas most other phones tend to have 24mm or 28mm as the default setting at 1x—and 35mm tends to be 1.5x. Here, it works as 1x and that means you get a much more focused and likeable tighter view of the subject.The X300 Ultra doesn’t have a camera control button, and that is a glaring miss for a superphone that claims such serious photography credentials. I also couldn’t find a way to repurpose the power key to be customisable, when the camera is in use.Heft and gravitasAmidst all the camera focus, it is entirely human to misplace attention on other elements that make the Vivo X300 Ultra an ultra-phone. The design is one of those, done well enough. Eclipse Black in particular looks classy. There is a large camera island, perceptibly chunkier than the one on the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. This is where Samsung has perhaps done well enough to maintain a distinct personality with the Galaxy S26 Ultra.Overall design language is largely similar for the ultra-flagships, also because the physics of optics and battery capacity, needs room to work with. Likeable, even for fairly large and heft laden phones. Very fine build quality, with attention to the details coming through quite as you’d expect. Etchings on the camera ring, for instance, is something the connoisseurs expect and appreciate.Vivo has carried forward the 6.82-inch Zeiss Master Colour Display in terms of size and resolution from the previous generation of the Ultra flagship, which never arrived in India. Of course, with the extensive Zeiss influence on the camera, having a display which doesn’t match the photography output would’ve made little sense. And on the point of things that simply work, the 6,600mAh uses what Vivo calls semi-solid-state battery 2.0 tech.In the real world, it simply means close to two days of battery life under regular workloads, and even with extensive camera usage, you’ll still more than a day before this drops to 15% charge and requests for the charger to be plugged in.It is unbelievable how good the Vivo X300 Ultra is as a camera and as a phone. You could have personal preferences for the overall tonality and tuning between the three combinations (Xiaomi-Leica, Oppo-Hasselblad and Vivo-Zeiss), but the reality is that Zeiss optimisations and Vivo’s generational enhancements peg this on the same level as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra in terms of personal preference for most photography preferences.With the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 as its beating heart, and the X300 Ultra rarely betrays heating on the back panel even after a fair few minutes of 4K60fps video recording—key to this is the liquid cooling vapour chamber, which has a wider coverage than before. Just one of the many things Vivo’s engineers have paid attention towards improving. I’m glad Vivo is selling the X300 Ultra in just one variant (16GB+512GB), which keeps things uncomplicated.Questions you must answerIt needs that uncomplicated spec combination too, because the true decision making headache is whether to buy the Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra and the Telephoto Extender Gen 2 accessories. Particularly before splashing a lot of money on these. Chances are, if you feel a need to, you’d have a separate digital camera system in place already. Would you give that up for an AI enhanced photography experience that may or may not be to your liking?Secondly, the Telephoto Extender Gen 2 Ultra is significantly heavier and larger in comparison—trying walking around in a public place with this. It’s heavy, it’ll garner unwanted attention, and you don’t want dust getting inside it either. You get the idea. Perhaps the more compact Telephoto Extender Gen 2 was as far as this initiative should have gone. Last and not least, when the X300 Ultra’s telephoto sensor can deliver very crisp and detailed handheld zoom photos at 1195mm, is there really a need for a separate lens?(Vishal Mathur is Technology Editor for Hindustan Times. When not making sense of technology, he often searches for an elusive analog space in a digital world.)