Vivo’s X500 Pro Max proves 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 made it stand 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 either in the new X500 Pro Max. It has an impressive camera system with world-leading dynamic range and the same great telephoto lens found in the Ultra. But it’s lost a little something of what made its predecessor quite so special.

The X500 Pro Max is the latest in a trend that’s 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 hikes. A little of column A, a little of column B, I suspect.

The Pro Max adopts plenty of flagship features found in the older Ultra. It’s the same size, for one, and has a matching 1440p, 144Hz OLED display. It’s got an even bigger battery — 7,800mAh — which breezes through two days of use, with similar 90W wired 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 features the exact 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 a little unfair to expect it to match or beat the older Ultra. The problem isn’t that this camera is worse than that phone’s, though, but that it’s much less unique.

As you’d expect from a step-down model, the 50-megapixel, 1/1.28-inch-type main camera sensor is both smaller and lower resolution than the Ultra’s, impacting its quality. But the newer phone offsets that a little thanks to one edge on the Ultra: It uses Sony’s new Lytia L910 image sensor, which features LOFIC technology that enables a wider 17-stop dynamic range, with the enhancements primarily in the highlights.

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

This, like most phones’ main cameras, is a wide-angle in truth. It’s designed to take in as much of a scene as possible, reserving the ultrawide for truly large landscape shots. It’s part of why I’ve taken to stepping back and using the telephoto by default on many phones, enjoying the tighter framing and better bokeh, but that often brings other quality compromises, especially in lower light.

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

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

The ethos of the X300 Ultra was that all three lenses should deliver comparable quality. As such, it treated its ultrawide like another 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’s main camera, so a repeat of that feat was never especially likely, but the 1/2.75-inch-type ultrawide in the X500 Pro Max is still a notable step down.

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

It’s important to put these gripes 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; every lens benefits from Vivo’s naturalistic color-tuning, developed together with Zeiss, and video capabilities include Log recording and 4K at 240fps slow motion. It supports Vivo’s teleconverter lenses too, including a seriously chunky 400mm option. It’s just a shame that the most interesting elements of the Ultra’s camera haven’t trickled down to its first Pro Max too.

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

All I hope now is that when the X500 Ultra rolls around come spring, it builds on the success of the older Ultra, and perhaps finds new ways to make its cameras stand out. After all, if the Pro Max costs €1,799, the Ultra could cost substantially more — and will have its work cut out to prove it’s worth it.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge