Vivo X50 Review: Big On Camera
Vivo once again marked its entry in the premium segment with the X50 series in India. Vivo which sells most of the smartphones in the budget to the mid-range segment has now gone premium by creating its own niche. The X50 and X50 pro touted to be redefining the experience of photography. Will it able to create its own niche? Let’s check it out
Design: Vivo X50 appears to be very sleek and premium exactly the same as its premium sibling. As soon you turn the smartphone to its back, you will be amazed by its neat look and matte finish. It is covered with a frosted glass alongside the quad-camera setup on the top-left corner. The bottom side of the smartphone boasts USB Type-C port, a dual SIM tray that can hold 2 SIM cards, speaker grilles, and a microphone. The smartphone doesn’t support extended storage so buying a smartphone with more storage will be a wise choice.
Coming to sides, the right side of the smartphone boasts the power button and volume rockers while the left side is totally bare. The sides of the smartphone are protected with metallic walls and a smartphone overall surrounded with scratch-proof glass. At the front, you also get a 32 MP selfie shooter in a hole punch design along with the secondary microphone at the top.
The smartphone feels lighter when you hold it despite all its premium looks and a massive battery. Overall, we really liked the design and Vivo once again proved why users admire their design language.
Display: Vivo X50 features a 6.56-inch Full-HD+ (1,080x2,376 pixels) Flat Ultra O AMOLED Screen with HDR 10+ support, 90Hz refresh rate, and 180Hz touch response rate. The 90Hz refresh rate implies that display has the ability to refresh itself 90 times in a single second. It eases your scrolling experience, at the same time phone becomes more responsive to the touch. Vivo X50 offers great viewing angles and produce rich and vibrant colors with High Dynamic range. Being an AMOLED panel, the screen is bright enough to maintain its legibility under direct sunlight. Watching Web-series and Movies was really fun on this smartphone because of its immersive display. Vivo X50 also gets Widevine L1 Certification so you will be able to stream HD videos on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and more.
Camera: Now we have reached its most talk-about section. Yes, the camera. It sports quad-camera module at the rear. It sports 48MP Sony IMX598 primary sensor, an 8 MP Super-wide angle lens with 120-degree FOV, 5MP Macro lens, 13MP Portrait lens. The pictures that we captured in bright daylight come out to be super rich in colors and detailed.
The portrait mode needs little more work as sometimes it fails to recognize the edges, but most of the time it works effortlessly. It also supports various modes such as 48 MP, Pano, Live Photo, Slo-mo, Pro, Doc mode, Time-lapse, AR Stickers, and Jovi Vision. The Fixed macro mode can focus at 1.5 cm but loses the overall image quality. Coming to its Night mode, it works satisfactory and one can obtain good results with it. You also get the four filters to play with the lights around you.
The bokeh mode works perfectly and able to capture crisp and more detailed pictures with realistic blur. As far as Zoom is concerned, the X50 can capture decent photographs till 10x zoom but once you cross it, images start getting distorted. Overall, it captures great pictures that can even face off with Samsung and Huawei flagships.
Moving towards videos, Vivo X50 can record 4k videos at 30fps from the rear camera whereas the front camera can record 720p videos with 30fps. The videos recorded in daylight conditions were rich in colors and have a High dynamic range. Shooting in low light conditions amazed us with the clarity that it offered. It would not wrong to say that, Vivo X50 is one of the best camera phones available in the market right now. However, it lacks some features such as 5 axis gimbal OIS and 60X zoom periscope lens which is offered by its premium sibling Vivo X50 Pro by spending some more bucks.
Camera Samples
Bokeh Mode
Fixed Macro Mode (1.5 cm)
Night shot
Selfie ( front camera)
Note: The samples uploaded here are resized for online uploading purpose
Performance: Vivo X50 comes equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 processor coupled with the Adreno 618 GPU. The smartphone comes packed with 8GB of RAM and up to 256 GB internal storage. We got the unit with 8GB RAM and 128 GB Storage variant for the review. The daily operations for this smartphone are not an issue and it performs its role very well. We played many high-end games at higher graphic rates to test its potential and it delivers effortlessly. Long hours of playing games can be resulting in little heating but it is a general problem. The processor that it offers is mid-range and equivalent to the processors that come in smartphones around Rs 20K. So this could be a deal-breaker for some. Still, the smartphone doesn’t compromise with performance and it will not let you feel that you are underpowered. Vivo always touted X50 series as camera or photography centric smartphones. “Something has to lose to get something”.
Vivo X50 gets the latest version of the company’s User Interface FunTouch OS version 10.5 layered on top with Android 10. The UI has now become clean and also get an app drawer. It also gets features like dark mode, ultra game mode, and eye protection mode. I wonder why such a flagship device still comes with a bunch of bloatware apps.
Coming to the battery of Vivo X50, it gets its juice from 4,200mAh battery which can easily last long for a day after moderate usage. If you reduce the screen refresh rate to 60Hz then you can expect one extra hour of usage. The Vivo X50 gets a 33W flash charger that can fully charge the smartphone in 1hour and 12 minutes to be precise (can vary).
Verdict: Vivo X50 offers premium and unique build quality, great cameras, Ultra O AMOLED display with 90Hz refresh rate but still lacks somewhere in terms of performance due to its mid-range processor. If you have a photographer soul inside you then this smartphone is for you. This is probably one of the best camera phones that I have tested. If you want to look elsewhere, iQOO 3 and Realme X3 SuperZoom are worth mentioning in the segment.
