Jaipur isn’t one of those destinations where the charm builds slowly. You just go out, and it’s hitting you immediately from all sides: harsh sun reflecting off the sandstone buildings, interesting faces, and unseasonal rainfall; something photo-worthy is always going on all around. This city is essentially the ultimate challenge for any camera you bring. The Vivo X300 FE, with its triple-camera setup, ZEISS optics, and Telephoto Extender Kit attached, got only two days with me to show its mettle in very different environments.
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The Vivo X300 FE features a primary 50MP primary sensor, a secondary 50MP telephoto sensor, and a third 8MP ultra-wide sensor, all fitted behind ZEISS optics. The Telephoto Extender Kit, meanwhile, is a small lens that can be clipped onto your camera to enhance its telephoto abilities, offering a 200mm base focal length before you even factor in the digital zoom. On paper, this is one very impressive camera system. Here’s what it managed to pull off.
Amber Fort on an overcast afternoon is a different beast from its golden-hour tourist brochure version. The lighting is harsh but the rain helped out there, the shadows are deep inside the corridors, and the dynamic range demands are real. The Sheesh Mahal, the mirror palace inside the fort, is the kind of interior that will expose a camera fast. A bright latticed window on one end, ornate inlay work everywhere else, and a reflective marble floor catching it all. Shot at 73mm, f/2.65, the main camera held the highlights at the window without crushing the intricate detail on the walls around it. That is not easy to pull off by just pointing and shooting, but the X300 FE did it without drama.
The telephoto earns its keep here too. In the open courtyards of the fort, where distance is what you are limited to, the periscope lens delivered. In photos, colours remained consistent with the primary lens, while details were retained when necessary. I took it up to 800mm with the Extender Kit mainly for experimentation and got myself a monkey sitting between two pillars. However here, the detail becomes softened and the image shows the effects of processing, but just the fact that 800mm is available in a phone camera is already impressive. My personal sweet spot with the Extender Kit was at 400mm or below. From there on the pictures began to look a little too computational for my taste.
At 85mm and f/0.95, the main sensor also showed what it can do. A man selling tea leaning against a wall with a thermos. The bokeh is smooth, the colors on the sandstone wall behind him are warm and accurate, and there’s a stillness to the image that works really well.
A shoutout to the Landscape and Night mode since it did indeed change the way I photographed during both sessions. This mode deals with wide shots and dim lighting, and it performs superbly, keeping control over tone range, preserving details from turning into noise, and giving photos an atmospheric feel rather than merely making them bright. I used this mode for almost all of my photos at Amber Fort when the sun started setting.
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Galtaji, the Monkey Temple, is intimate in a way Amber Fort isn’t. It’s busier, noisier, and full of people who are not there for tourism. People just going about their morning, nobody posing for anything. This is where the telephoto lens became the camera I lived on.
At 400mm with the Extender Kit, I got a frame of two people sitting against a temple wall. The separation is clean, and the detail in the fabric and skin texture is there. The portrait mode on the primary simply does not give you this. You move away from your subjects and create enough space for them while shooting with the telephoto lens, and the results will more likely than not be more polished than anything you could take.
The monkey shot, 200mm, f/2.65, ISO71, is the one that stuck with me most. It was a macaque sitting on top of a wooden beam with the temple’s painted facade in the back. The monkey was fully focused on its meal. All this happened only because of the reach you get with the telephoto lens. Any other phone wouldn’t get you such a photo, I tried.
The Vivo X300 FE also has an AI camera mode with a selection of scene presets, and I tried one. The Twilight preset, specifically. The situation: 6 PM, sun still very much up, light harsh and flat. I pointed the camera directly at the sun, clicked a photo and waited. Six minutes later, this is what came out.
It works. I will give it that. The camera has convincingly constructed a dusk scene: deep blue sky, stars already visible, the fort on the hill lit as if by floodlights and the courtyard below glowing warmly. If you did not know, this photo was taken at six in the evening with the sun still blazing, you might not question it.
But look at the far left of the frame. There’s a section of the fort that catches what still reads, to me, as sunlight. The mode has disguised most of it well; the main courtyard light has been concentrated and repositioned to look like it’s coming from a bulb, but the tell is there if you look for it.
More than the technical limitations, though, I find myself struggling with the premise of the whole thing. Photography, at its core, is about capturing a moment. The AI mode is capturing something, and then it’s constructing a scene around it that didn’t exist. AI image generation makes sense to me because it helps create visuals that couldn’t otherwise be made. But in photography, manufacturing a moment you didn’t actually witness feels like it defeats the purpose. I got a striking image out of it. I also have no interest in using it again.
The ultra-wide is where the Vivo X300 FE quietly asks you to lower your expectations. The fall in image quality here is apparent as soon as you switch, and in a city full of carved stones, mosaic floors, and other such finely detailed surfaces that beg you to capture them with a macro lens, the fact that the camera features only an 8MP sensor leaves me wanting more.
As I already said before, digital zoom beyond 3x is another area where the X300 FE seems to paint over the reality of what’s being captured by overprocessing most images. Images tend to become soft, and as you continue zooming in, you may notice that images become a little illustrative. If you’re using the Extender Kit, then I would advise trying your best to keep below 400mm on anything you intend to use.
Two days, two locations and hundreds of frames. The Vivo X300 FE is a camera system that rewards patience, but also can be used to just point and shoot almost anything if you are on the correct lens. The primary is excellent. The telephoto is genuinely capable and becomes something else entirely with the Extender Kit attached. The ultra-wide is the weak link you’ll have to work around. And somewhere in there is a camera that, in the right light and the right hands, produces images that are hard to dismiss.
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