FEB 3, 2024
NimishAndAkriti
This is pretty much THE kind of snap that photographers love to take. - a macro/close up of a bee sitting on a flower, It is also the kind of photograph that is rather difficult to take with a phone camera. Getting close is difficult - bees are skittish and can fly away. And while telephoto zoom can help, it has limitations in terms of quality and in tracking moving subjects. The Vivo X100 Pro is however, crazy good in this zone. Just look at that picture!
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It is not even a one-off. We took a whole series of images, with the bee on the flower and got incredibly clear and detailed shots, even though the bee kept flying to different parts of the flower. The reason for this evidently a new kind of macro system on the Vivo X100 Pro, which uses the telephoto camera on the phone for macros instead of the ultrawide camera, as most other phones do. Vivo calls this telephoto macro, and it does not half work!
To give you folks a better idea, this is how far we were from the flower and its resident bee when we took the photographs, as seen from the main camera (itself a pretty good 1 inch sensor). If we had tried going closer, the bee would have taken off, And using a zoom normally would have led to a few compromises in image quality as the bee was moving constantly. The Vivo X100 Pro however, handled it superbly. This is 4.3x zoom, and you can go up to 8.6!
Vivo says that it has tweaked its 50 MP 'floating' telephoto sensor to have more focal points, track moving objects, and get better bokeh, than you would from a normal telephoto snap. And it works! Colours seem a little saturated, but that's a small price for such super shots. You can even switch to manual mode while shooting in telephoto macro. Frankly, we have not seen macros like this from any phone camera, including iPhones, Pixels and Galaxies.
We would say that this makes the Vivo X100 Pro a terrific option for anyone who wants a phone with great close up and macro photography muscle - folks who take product shots (like us) or who like to get close up shots of birds, animals and insects (also us). It opens up a whole new perspective of phone photography, and is a whole lot more useful than trying to snap the moon, like some of its rivals. It is a proper flagship phone too. Mind you, Rs 89,999!