Vivo’s X500 Pro Max proves that its ultra is still in a league of its own

When I declared this spring that Vivo’s X300 Ultra had the best cameras in any phone, two things stood out in my mind: its excellent main camera with a narrow 35mm focal length and what remains the most capable ultrawide in any phone worldwide.

You won’t find it in the new X500 Pro Max either. It has an impressive camera system with world-leading dynamic range and the same great telephoto lens found in the Ultra. But it has lost a little something of what made its predecessor so special.

The X500 Pro Max is the latest in a trend that has seen China’s major Android players roll out Pro Max models, including Xiaomi, Oppo, Honor, and now Vivo. The new models close the gap between their previous Pro flagships and camera-centric Ultra models – or, if you prefer to be cynical about it, are an excuse to slap “Max” on the box to better mask RAM-induced price increases. A bit of column A, a bit of column B, I suspect.

The Pro Max adopts many flagship features found in the older Ultra. It’s the same size, for one, and has a matching 1440p, 144Hz OLED display. It has an even bigger battery – 7,800mAh – that runs through two days of use, with similar 90W wireless and 40W wireless charging. Unlike the Ultra, it doesn’t use the latest Snapdragon chipset, but its MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro delivers roughly comparable performance. It even has the same periscope telephoto camera, one of the best in any phone. Then there’s the price: €1,799 (about $2,000) puts this squarely in the ultra-premium bracket.

But despite all that, this isn’t a true successor to the X300 Ultra, which is still rumored to see a direct sequel sometime next year. The X500 Pro Max still sits half a step down in Vivo’s hierarchy, and so it would be somewhat unfair to expect it to match or beat the older Ultra. The problem is not that this camera is worsened like that phone’s, if, but that it is much less unique.

As you’d expect from a step-down model, the 50-megapixel, 1/1.28-inch-type main camera sensor is smaller and lower-resolution than the Ultra, which affects its quality. But the newer phone makes up for that a bit thanks to an edge on the Ultra: It uses Sony’s new Lytia L910 image sensor, which has LOFIC technology that enables a wider 17-stop dynamic range, with the improvements mainly in the highlights.

But the X300 Ultra’s camera wasn’t just notable for technical quality. I like the fact that it adopted a 35mm focal length, and I’m disappointed that the Pro Max reverts to the same 24mm focal length found on iPhones and countless others.

This, like most phone main cameras, is a wide angle in truth. It’s designed to capture as much of a scene as possible, with ultra-wide reserved for really large landscape shots. It’s part of why I’ve taken to going back and using the telephoto as standard on many phones, enjoying the tighter frame and better bokeh, but that often comes with other quality compromises, especially in lower light.

A 35mm main camera, in contrast, feels closer to many kits and prime lenses you can grab for a regular camera, narrow enough to use for portraits and targeted framing. It sits more evenly between the 14mm ultrawide and 85mm telephoto, giving you natural options across the range. You can of course just use the X500 Pro Max’s 24mm main camera and zoom in a bit, but then you’re wasting some of the sensor and relying on digital zoom tricks, rather than making the most of the lens optics. I’m adamant about shooting full focal length with my cameras when I can, and you should be too.

If there’s a saving grace for the decision to revert to a wider main camera, it’s that it helps make up for the X500 Pro Max’s other shortcoming: a much smaller ultra-wide camera sensor.

The ethos of the X300 Ultra was that all three lenses should deliver comparable quality. As such, it treated its ultrawide like any other main camera, with a large sensor and even optical image stabilization, a rarity on wide lenses. In fact, its sensor is the same size as the X500 Pro Max Main cameraSo a repetition of that feat was never particularly likely, but the 1 / 2.75-inch type ultrawide in the X500 Pro Max is still a notable step down.

Take the phone and a night match Champions League game, there was a clear gap in the quality of the ultrawide to the other two lenses. Under the bright stadium lights, the ultrawides blew out the white details on the pitch and player kits, leaving the crowd in comparative darkness. The main and ultrawide were able to bring out more detail from the dimly lit spectators and handle the highlights on the field better, without completely giving up the contrast that gave the scene its character.

It’s important to put this gripe in context: This is a truly excellent camera system for a phone, and still more capable than any you can officially buy in the US. The returning telephoto in particular is exceptional; each lens benefits from Vivo’s naturalistic color tuning, co-developed with Zeiss, and video capabilities include logo recording in 4K at 240fps slow motion. It also supports Vivo’s teleconverter lenses, including a seriously chunky 400mm option. It’s just a shame that the most interesting elements of the Ultra camera did not trickle down to its first Pro Max either.

Strangely, another phone I tested this month feels like it picked up where the X300 Ultra left off: Oppo’s Find X10 Pro Max, a pretty direct competitor to this phone. Its triple 200-megapixel camera system still uses a wide-angle main camera, but at least includes a significantly improved ultrawide camera to create the same feeling that each of its three rear lenses is of comparable quality.

All I’m hoping for now is that when the X500 Ultra rolls out in the spring, it builds on the success of the older Ultra, and maybe finds new ways to showcase its cameras. After all, if the Pro Max costs €1,799, the Ultra could cost significantly more – and will have its work cut out to prove it’s worth it.

Photo by Dominic Preston/The Verge