I’ve tested the best camera phone for $400

Vivo has a pedigree of great camera phones. Its X series phones, such as my favorite Vivo X200 Pro, specialize in capturing images that look far too similar to those with those captured with professional cameras. Over the years, these capabilities have trickled down to the sub-flagship series and have now come to a phone further down Vivo’s price-wise hierarchy of devices. I have been testing the Vivo V50, a mere $400 Android phone with excellent features such as a 120Hz curved AMOLED, 90-watt fast charging, IP68 and IP69 rating, and quite a peculiar glass back that makes you feel like you’re peeping through as conduit in the space-time continuum.

What truly amazes me about the Vivo V50 is its camera, which borrows heavily from the flagship X series. As I will show you below, it captures some unbelievably good and almost magical shots that I haven’t seen on any non-Vivo device. Its features seem far above its price point, and the picture quality makes me feel it has, perhaps, the best cameras I have ever tried on a mid-range phone.

Here’s why I feel the Vivo V50 is above its competitors and easily beats any other phone for this price.

Vivo’s alliance with Zeiss pays off

Vivo has collaborated with optics company Zeiss for the last six generations of its flagship X series phones, which has helped Vivo bilaterally. On the hardware front, Zeiss enables Vivo to design better lenses that minimize color distortion and glares. In terms of software, Vivo has adopted Zeiss’ color profile and emulated bokeh styles inspired by popular Zeiss camera lenses.

For the mid-range V series, these enhancers have been relatively new, and only available for the last two generations — with the V50 being the third one. More interestingly, though, Zeiss upgrades have been limited to the Pro variants in the series, and the Vivo V50 is actually the first non-Pro variant to get a Zeiss label and enhancements that come with it.

For the Vivo V50, these improvements are largely limited to software, but the company has poured all its strengths to ensure the phone performs better than the rest, as you will see with examples in the coming sections.

Portraits better than any other $400 phone

The Vivo V50 lacks a dedicated telephoto camera, but Vivo is confident the 50MP primary camera is good enough for portraits. The confidence reflects through photos the phone takes, and leaves no evidence for the lack of a dedicated portrait shooter. In addition, the Zeiss-inspired bokeh styles make portraits rather unique (unless compared to another Vivo flagship), and no other phone in the segment does that.

Take for instance this series of portraits taken in daylight, all of them at 2X zoom. The Vivo V50 tastefully captured the details around my face and hair, with a seamless transition to the background, resulting in a very natural-looking bokeh.

The camera also recreates bokeh effects from Zeiss lenses, such as B-Speed, Biotar, Planar, and Sonnar very effectively. In each of these cases, dots of light filtering through the tree behind me are converted to specific shapes, which on the original Zeiss lens are created with physical lens shutters shaped like these. On the Vivo V50, all the effects are rendered digitally.

It’s surprising to see the Vivo V50 accomplish this without a dedicated camera with a longer focal range. But, it is challenging to spot a single spot where the bokeh appears awkwardly imposed.

Portraits shot indoors recreate similar Zeiss bokeh effects, even with the muted intensity of the tiny lights in the background (actually a chandelier). Details around my friend’s face feel compromised as the phone tries to use HDR to brighten it up against light. But, bokeh is still as compelling as it is on images during the day.

While all the portraits above were shot at 2X zoom, the mode is not limited to that one camera.

Equal love for all cameras

Special portrait effects extended to all cameras on the Vivo V50, including the ultrawide-angle and the front cameras. Since the primary camera is responsible for shooting images at both 1X and 2X, this leads to three different levels of zoom for the portrait mode.

Instead of multipliers for the zoom levels, Vivo denotes them in steps of focal length, suggesting the approximate values these cameras simulate. As a result, the portrait mode can shoot at 23mm, 35mm, and 50mm — the higher the number, the farther a camera can zoom into.

Here’s how the same scene is captured at three different levels of zoom by the phone.

Despite images taken at varying levels of zoom, V50 does a good job at creating the shallow depth of field on the background. The intensity of bokeh also varies with the focal length as the phone tries to replicate the effect using nothing but software.

Admittedly, daylight does benefit the results, lending more clarity to the images and maintaining a clear distinction between the foreground and the background. So I wouldn’t call it as good as premium phones, such as the Vivo X200 Pro. But the results are still appreciable considering the hardware — including the not-so-sophisticated image signal processor on the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset inside the phone.

I’m truly impressed with its portraits shot with the ultrawide angle camera, which, despite being less powerful than the main sensor, captures details well.

In these portraits shot with the ultrawide angle camera, you can see the V50 preserves focus on the subjects’ bodies while blurring the background. It does all of that without autofocus on the specific camera, making it a bigger deal — in addition to the fact that most phones won’t let you shoot portraits with ultrawide cameras at all. In addition, Vivo’s special color filters also add more character to images if you are looking to just shoot and post them to your social media immediately.

But beyond daylight, the Vivo V50 also gets a dedicated feature to enable clear and crisp portraits in low light.

Improved soft light for better night portraits

Vivo champions low-light photography on its flagship devices, such as the Vivo X200 Pro, with large aperture lenses and dedicated hardware for image processing. However, limitations with mid-range cameras and processors, such as the V series phones, have steered in the direction of another lighting solution, i.e., a soft light.

The soft light, which Vivo calls “Aura Light,” has been present in four generations before this one, and has improved with each new model. In its fifth iteration, the Aura Light is 1.4 times brighter than the last time, and has a broader range of color temperatures — ranging from a very warm, almost orange hue to cool white. The colors of the light automatically adjust based on the distance between the phone and the subject, though you can also override the controls using the existing sliders. In addition to the light’s temperature, Vivo also adds controls to manually adjust the intensity.

Below I take a look at a series of portraits taken at different zoom levels, with and without the Aura Light. For a better comparison, I have arranged images in an increasing order of zoom from left to right, with the top row showing images without the light while the bottom row is similarly arranged but with photos with the light. To challenge the Vivo V50, these images were shot at night in a park with limited lighting.

As you will notice in the top row, images without the light have ample details and still manage to distinguish between me as the subject and the background. You would also see Zeiss’ Biotar effect in action, making rugby-shaped artifacts from dots of light seeping through the tree behind me.

However, shadows in the images away details and textures around my face, hair, and the hoodie are less visible.

But with the V50’s soft light in action, lost details are easily recovered, evenly lighting up parts of my face as well as the clothes. I also like that the phone automatically adjusts the light’s color to preserve the warm tones of the shot instead of washing me out or making my face look extra pale as a standard phone flash would have.

On a technical level, the soft light allows images to be shot at a lower ISO and faster shutter, resulting in fewer distortions and more sharpness.

The Zeiss effects in the background are lost with the flash as the overall exposure levels on the frame increase. But, as I will demonstrate below, stronger lights will still be seen.

The following set of images represent another remarkable use case for the soft light. All three images below were captured without any external light. Without the soft light, you would simply see my silhouette.

But the soft light comes to the rescue, capturing some reasonable details in the images. These aren’t as impressive as the shots above, especially with the smoothened texture of my face, but I would still give it to the Vivo V50 considering no other phone, including those prices much higher, would come close in terms of details without an external light source, such as ring light.

Another impressive bit is that the tiny soft light can provide sufficient light without any majorly harsh shadows. These images above were shot at a distance of over five feet from the camera, which exemplifies that the soft light is supremely better than any regular phone flash.

Vivo V50’s portraits compared to the OnePlus 13R

Comparing the Vivo V50’s portraits to a slightly more expensive phone — the OnePlus 13R — should hopefully give us a deeper understanding of how its strengths. Below is a series of portraits shot in very low light on both phones. Both phones have the same 50MP primary camera with the same sensor inside. So, any differences in the final images are because of camera algorithms. While we must also attribute part of the difference to specific modifications to lenses, none of the companies shares specifics in this regard. Let’s dig into the comparison.

Even though the OnePlus 13R gets a dedicated 2X sensor for portrait photography, low-light portraits default to the primary 50MP sensor. The first two images in the gallery below compare how the OnePlus 13R and Vivo V50 produce portraits without direct light.

While OnePlus tends to focus on exposure, Vivo aims to maintain a consistent brightness across the frame. Neither does an impressive job, but the Vivo takes an edge with a more natural background blur. The Vivo can also preserve the colorful twinkle lights in the background, while the OnePlus 13R completely paints over it, making the colorful LEDs seem like inconspicuous and faint halos.

Like the other images above, the impact of the soft light at improving details and sharpness without cleansing the image of its character is immediately visible.

Exceptionally good selfies

On the front, like two cameras on the back, the Vivo V50 gets a 50MP sensor. The sensor here is identical to the ultrawide-angle camera. Although the sensor is much smaller than the primary camera with the same resolution, it can click some really impressive shots as we saw with the ultrawide portraits above. The same is expected of the selfie camera here. But there’s one thing this camera does that almost no other phone’s selfie camera does in this price bracket.

The Vivo V50 gets autofocus on its selfie camera, which is rare. Despite our craze for selfies, autofocus on the front camera is limited to a small subset of premium phones — the iPhones, Galaxy S series, and the Pixels primarily. So, it’s fascinating to see Vivo take that route.

Autofocus on the front camera subtly blurs the background, emphasizing your face — or faces in the case of a group. More importantly, it ensures the faces captured in selfies are sharper, truly impacting how we perceive the photo. Additionally, you can take images are varying levels of zoom, with a 0.8X mode for a wider angle than the 1X. Surprisingly, there’s even a 2X option for selfies, which is something I don’t remember seeing on any phone I’ve reviewed recently.

The impact of the autofocus becomes immediately evident when we compare selfies shot on the OnePlus 13R and the Vivo V50 side by side. The selfie from the Vivo captures textures on the face better compared to the OnePlus. Besides that, the autofocus results in a subtle background blur even without the portrait mode engaged, immediately improving your perception about the camera.

This perception is taken up a notch when comparing portrait selfies taken with both phones. The Vivo already has an advantage with sharper details around the face, thanks to its autofocus, which also enhances the transition to the background. Interesting, Vivo’s Zeiss effects — Biotar in this case — also enhance the background while relatively better HDR processing of the background makes the image far more compelling.

For selfies to be shot in low light or at night, the Vivo V50 also offers a front-facing flash. Even though it’s a standard feature, the front facing flash borrows from the rear soft light, offering a slider to choose between a cool or a warm white light, so the face does not look oddly lit compared to the rest of the scene. If you would rather not deal with having to manually adjust the color of the screen flash, the phone can also be set to automatic color adjustment and expect it work flawlessly.

Even without the selfie flash engaged, the night mode comes into play, triggering a longer exposure duration. This helps capture well-illuminated selfies, as visible from the image on the right. And even without the same level of detail as daylight selfies, these images taken at night have plenty of elements to admire.

This is an exceptional camera phone

Vivo’s profound understanding and extensive research in simulating effects from actual DSLR or mirrorless cameras shows through each image. While Vivo has successfully accomplished that with its flagship X series, it’s fascinating to see the inexpensive V series — and that too, the non-Pro variant — follow suit.

It captures images with an incredible mastery, and sharing them with your friends or on social media will automatically garner inquiries about the brand behind it. Their astonishment on learning it’s a $400 phone is almost priceless. While I would highly recommend the Vivo V50 for its cameras, it’s equally compelling for its specs, which include a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, 12GB of RAM, up to 512GB of storage, and a large 6,000mAh battery with 90W fast charging and silicon-carbon tech that helps keep the phone fairly light despite what it packs.

I wouldn’t, however, recommend it to you if you’re in the U.S. unless you want it solely for good photos and usage off just Wi-Fi. For starters, Vivo doesn’t sell in the region so V50 likely wouldn’t work with your carrier. Although the phone hasn’t launched in Europe, previous models, such as the V40 series, have officially arrived in the region, and you should be able to use it without any issues.