The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is one of the very best phones on the market, and gets my vote for the most feature-packed phone right now. But when it comes purely to camera performance, Samsung's Ultra has been facing stiff competition from China's Ultras lately. These Chinese Ultras have included Xiaomi and Oppo, and now the latest and arguably the biggest rival yet has arrived, the Vivo X100 Ultra.

Ironically, the highlight feature of the Vivo X100 Ultra is its new 200MP Periscope zoom lens that was actually developed in collaboration with Samsung (and no, it is not uncommon for Samsung's highest tier image sensors to appear in other phones before they appear in Samsung phones). This new 85mm zoom sensor features a 1/1.4-inch image sensor that trumps the S24 Ultra Periscope's 1/2.6-inch sensor.

In fact, the Vivo X100 Ultra's sensor sizes and aperture basically beat the S24 Ultra in every meaningful area, so the only way for Samsung to win this camera shootout is if its software image processing is superior. We shall see if that's the case.

Camera hardware overview

The Vivo X100 Ultra features a triple lens rear-facing camera system, with two new sensors not seen before in a Vivo phone (these sensors didn't even exist until a few months ago). Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra introduces only one new camera (the 50MP Periscope zoom), with the other three sensors being brought back from the S23 Ultra. The 10MP 3X zoom, in particular, is years old. If you look at conventional camera specs (sensor size, megapixel, and aperture), Samsung only wins with their main camera megapixel count.

Main camera

During the day, or in scenes with great lighting, both the Vivo X100 Ultra and Galaxy S24 Ultra perform similarly when it comes to exposure and color science. Despite images two and three being shot against harsh backlight, both Ultras nailed HDR. Vivo's camera, due to having a larger sensor, has a shallower focus pane, which is usually great for portraits. However, for general scenery shots like this, you can see some objects that aren't in the same pane are out of focus. For example, in the third set, you can see the laptop screen is not in focus in Vivo's shot (because it's in the foreground), while Samsung's image has the whole frame in focus. Generally, I prefer shallower depth-of-field as it gives images more depth, but here, Samsung's image is preferred.

In the images that follow, throughout this article, the Vivo images will appear on the left and the Samsung images will appear on the right side for comparison.

Vivo's main sensor just takes in more light, as is evident in the second set above. Light information is the most important part of a digital image. If we zoom in to 100%, the Vivo shots are also sharper; however, with good lighting, the difference is marginal.

Moving to low light conditions, this next set was taken in my messy studio with most of the lights off except for the bathroom lights coming from the right of the frame. Other light sources include outside the window, and my laptop monitor just out of frame on the left side. Both shots brightened the scene with more enhancement than what my eyes could detect. Vivo, however, just snapped the shot as is, while Samsung deployed a 1.5 second night mode.

Just looking at these shots in full, on a phone screen, the Samsung shot holds up well. But if we zoom in and pixel peep, as you'll see below, Samsung's image appears far more processed and over-sharpened. Vivo's image appears more natural.

Let's move to the true test: zoom photography.

Zoom lens(es)

The Vivo X100 Ultra only has one zoom lens, shooting at 85mm (3.7X focal length) to Samsung's S24 Ultra, which has two zoom lenses, for 66mm (3X) and 115mm (5X) focal lengths. For the sake of comparison, I will compare Vivo's 3.7X against Samsung's 3X as is, so the framing will be slightly different. Then, for 5X, I will digitally zoom using Vivo's 3.7X lens.

Let's start with the shorter zoom. This is 3.7X vs 3X, 85mm vs 66mm.

The results are one-sided as expected. The S24 Ultra's 3X lens is at least three years old, has just 10MP resolution, and has a tiny 1/3.6-inch sensor size. Vivo's zoom lens (ironically co-developed by Samsung) is weeks old, has 50MP resolution, and a 1/1.4-inch sensor size. I wrote in my S24 Ultra review that the 3X lens is in dire need of upgrade, and this is why.

We don't even need to pixel peep the above samples, they're too lopsided. Let's move to the 5X zoom instead. This is where Samsung is using a newer sensor.

Much closer. Both lenses produced sharp 5X images, with some natural bokeh too. Vivo's bokeh is stronger, because it has a larger sensor, but Samsung's images look fine here. It's only if we pixel peep by looking at 100% crops do we see that Vivo's images are, again, less noisy.

Moving to lower light scenes, however, and the lead widens for Vivo.

We can see the Vivo images are more pleasing, especially in the first two sets. Ultimately, sensor size matters. But not many people may want to snap 5X zoom photos in dark scenes. During the day, the S24 Ultra's 5X zoom is more than good enough.

Ultra-wide and selfies

I am combining these categories because these are not images that people tend to pixel peep. Ultra-wide lenses are for sweeping landscape shots, and selfies are mostly for social media.

For ultra-wide, I think Samsung does a slightly better job of fixing distortion, as well as using software to produce a well lit image. For selfies, it's basically a draw for me. I purposely snapped the selfie with only half my face, with the other half out the window with harsh sunlight as a factor, and both phones handled HDR well.

Conclusion: Vivo's Ultra is the most Ultra of them all

By my math, Vivo won the main camera category a bit, and the zoom comparison by a landslide. Samsung wins in ultra-wide, and the selfies are a virtual tie. This gives the overall win to the Vivo X100 Ultra. But Vivo's flagship is a China-only release, so most people would not be able to buy it easily. It's a shame, because a phone this good deserves a global release. As it stands, Samsung's spot as the best camera hardware in the west is safe.