Vivo X300 FE early impression: Promising Zeiss cameras but what about the price?
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Jaipur does something to photography. The city is almost unfair in how photogenic it is: terracotta walls catching the golden hour, narrow lanes framing chaos beautifully, and a quality of light that makes even mediocre cameras look inspired. That is the landscape I found myself in when spending some time with the Vivo X300 FE, and for a phone that leads with its camera credentials, the Pink City was about as good a proving ground as I could have hoped for.
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The Vivo X300 FE carries forward the company’s familiar ZEISS partnership with a triple camera system: a 50MP primary, a 50MP periscope telephoto, and an 8MP ultra-wide. That’s not all though, as it is also accompanied by the 200mm ZEISS Telephoto Extender Kit, a physical clip-on lens that extends the phone’s optical zoom reach even further. It is confident about where it wants to be positioned. This is a phone for people who shoot long. Whether the execution lives up to the hardware ambition is something we will get into properly some other time. For now, the samples we captured in Jaipur suggest that Vivo has not stumbled.
What we are clear about at this time, or at least if the leaks are anything to go by, is the price story, and it is a complicated one. Several reports on the internet point to an expected launch price of somewhere in the ballpark of around Rs 75,000-Rs 80,000, which is a significant jump from the X200 FE, which debuted at Rs 54,999. At this rate, the irony isn’t lost on me that the FE, the ‘Fan Edition,’ historically a code for accessible tech, may just end up being priced above the standard X300 that launched at Rs 75,999.
Of course, this is not a Vivo problem per se, though. Counterpoint Research’s Memory Price Tracker shows mobile DRAM costs have risen 50 per cent quarter-on-quarter, with the firm’s Senior Analyst stating that ‘higher retail prices are unavoidable in 2026 as rising costs will be passed to consumers.’ IDC frames it bluntly: every wafer allocated to high-bandwidth memory for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a smartphone. AI infrastructure is looking to consume over 20 per cent of global DRAM wafer capacity, and smartphone OEMs across the board are absorbing that squeeze into their pricing. The X300 FE’s speculative price increase may be a direct result of the rising memory costs.
For an expected price of somewhere in between Rs 75,000 and Rs 80,000, the Vivo X300 FE walks into a heated area with neighbours like Samsung’s S26, OnePlus 15, and its own sibling, the Vivo X300, all within shouting distance. Whether it does enough to justify the premium over its predecessor is a question the market will answer when sales begin.
The full verdict on what the Vivo X300 FE actually delivers will have to wait until then. Stay tuned to Digit for more.
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