Galaxy S25 Ultra vs vivo X200 Pro vs iPhone 16 Pro Max Camera Comparison - Close Battle!

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra's biggest camera upgrade has to be that 50MP ultra wide-angle camera. Actually, not just that, there are improvements to the camera algorithm thanks in part to the new Snapdragon ISP which actually improves the image quality. I've already explored the differences with the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, if you haven't watched that video yet, watch it here. But the real competition is between these three phones, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and the Vivo X200 Pro. Let's put them to the battle, and trust me, this one was very tough to evaluate. Hi, I'm Aishat, you're watching Track and Take English, your destination for detailed, incisive gadget reviews. Now, I'll start with the fact that the primary camera on all the three phones have similar sized sensors, but different megapixels. Processing is handled differently on all the three when it comes to retrieving the details, Apple's 24MP outputs mean that you will generally see more details and sharper textures. Between Samsung and Vivo, I like Samsung's new processing that doesn't over sharpen things and keeps it looking natural, it actually looks better than Vivo here. Now, colors are close to neutral on the iPhone 16 Pro Max and the Vivo X200 Pro. Samsung, as you can see here, tends to make the pinks, the reds, and the greens slightly deeper with extra contrast to make it look more attractive. But that's only when the colors are more intense does it add more intensity, because in the second set of samples, that's not really the case, you will be hard pressed to find the difference in color tuning between the three phones. Of course, Vivo has three color modes to pick from, Zeiss Natural, Textured, and Vivid. And there are some filters too, which have a single slider to change the intensity. With the S25 Ultra, you get new analog style filters that have a few more sliders per filter to tune the picture as per your liking. Now, the party trick here is that Samsung lets you pick any picture and create a filter from that picture by using that picture as a reference point. Now, this is something that other phones don't let you do. In comparison, I also do really like Apple's photographic styles, they're very easy to use and intuitive as well. Now, when it comes to processing high dynamic range scenes, Vivo is the most capable one. In this image, you can see excellent highlight control and tastefully lifted up shadows. Now, Samsung comes a close second here. The iPhone image would have looked better if the shadows could have been slightly more lifted. Now, if you move your gaze to the potted plant at the bottom right, you will see how all of these three phones and their algorithms process noise or do noise correction differently. Vivo smooths out the noise completely, but makes the details slightly soft. I think it's tastefully done. Samsung has more noise, but the most amount of details as well. Now, iPhone is somewhere between the two. In low light, Samsung's processing ensures it makes pictures look bright, but a closer 100% crop clearly reveals that it creates a lot of artifacts and unnatural details. Now, Vivo is the best of the lot when it comes to retrieving details in low light and smoothing out the noise at the same time. Now, iPhone again will fall somewhere between the two. Skin tone rendition with the primary camera is close to neutral on the X200 Pro thanks to the ZEISS natural mode. With Samsung, the skin tones are generally warmer to make it look more pleasing. Now, I don't know if it's just me, but the iPhone's skin tone processing has gotten a lot intense with the updates. It used to be spot on before, but the iOS 18 update is ruining this phone constantly, man. Having said that, the details that it captures with that 24 MP outputs. Now, the portrait algorithm works differently on all the three phones. Let me explain. Vivo prefers traditional aperture lens measurements. So what you get are 23 mm, 35 mm, 50 mm, 85 mm, and 135 mm portraits. On the iPhone, you get 1x, 2x, and 5x. Samsung gives you 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, and everything in between. Yes, now you also can create portrait mode shots with digitally zoomed images. Now, comparing the 2x or the 50 mm portraits, you can tell all three are fantastic at depth mapping, but the edge detection is fantastic on the X200 Pro. Take a look at the strand of hair and the watch. My only problem is Vivo tends to whiten the skin tones. Here, the iPhone's skin tones are the best. Now, this is what I was expecting with the primary camera as well. Now, when you compare the 69 mm on Samsung and 85 mm on Vivo, I would pick Vivo here purely for the excellent edge detection. Again, the algorithm has managed to pick out even the flying strand of hair that is there. And finally, in the 5x comparison, it is Vivo again. That would be my choice. Then Samsung, then iPhone for me. Obviously, for this evaluation, I was purely looking at the depth mapping capabilities and, of course, the edge detection as well. As for the skin tones, I still think that iPhone beats out the other two. Looking at the low light portraits, the 2x on Vivo are the best, followed by iPhone and then Samsung. Vivo's very capable 3.7x telephoto hardware also puts out great quality in low light compared to the 3.7x on Samsung. At 5x, Samsung does a fantastic job. It is definitely better than the iPhone, which is a grainy mess. But here again, Vivo's 135 mm pulls out more details and the edge detection is excellent. For portraits, my final verdict is very easy. It's the X200 Pro first, then the Samsung and finally the iPhone. Now, let's talk about the ultra wide angle camera and the new hardware on the S25 Ultra. Now, when I compared the samples right next to each other on all these three phones, trust me, I couldn't tell the difference between the three. So take a look at this 100% crop. The detailed retention and the finer textures are largely similar on all the three phones. But yes, when you look at it, Samsung has the widest 13 mm lens, followed by iPhone, which has a 14 mm lens and Vivo, which has a 15 mm lens. Also, all the three phones do a very good job of distortion correction around the corner. So there's no warping as such, which is nice. And if you look at the color sense consistency between the primary and the ultra wide, it's actually good on all the three phones. There's nothing to tell the three apart. But it's in the low light ultra wide angle shots where things start getting interesting. Now, note that the ultra wide angle on all the three phones actually use a small sensor comparatively to the primary or the telephoto. Therefore, a 100% crop reveals that the iPhone has the softest details. Samsung employs sharpening and adds artifacts here, as you can tell. And Vivo takes it one step further and makes it completely unnatural. Now, with the new ultra wide on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, you also get better quality macro shots. In fact, even iPhone uses ultra wide, whereas Vivo uses the telephoto to actually capture macro shots. And it's called super macro. Now, the closest focusing distance, what I noticed is on the iPhone, then on the Samsung and finally Vivo. But when you look at the image quality, Vivo and Samsung offer far more details than Apple's macro. Now, if I had to pick one winner for macro shots and actually pick two, it'd be Vivo and Samsung. All right, now it's time to talk about the zoom. The 2x in sensor crop on all the three is almost equally matched in terms of detail retention. But at 3x, Samsung's optical zoom sensor actually pulls out more details than Vivo and the iPhone. And when you look at the 3.7x comparison shots, Vivo's optical lens obviously wins with excellent detail retention. Samsung is really good too here, but Apple is no match for the other two. Although if you were to do an optical to optical comparison, where you'd compare the 3x camera on the Samsung to the 3.7x camera on the Vivo, we all know that Vivo actually has a far more capable sensor. That 10MP 3x camera on the Samsung is a little too old now. Now, when you look at the 5x shot, Apple and Samsung's 5x dedicated lens do capture more details, but Apple has a lot of noise and the quality is definitely not as good as Samsung. Samsung's better here. In fact, if you ask me, I actually like Vivo's digital crop 5x shot over Apple's proper optical 5x shot. Now, when you move on to 10x, I think that Samsung's algorithm actually does a better job than the other two. But I do like Vivo here as well, because the added contrast is definitely helping make the image look good. And when you look at the iPhone's 10x capture, it definitely has a lot of noise and iPhone starts losing detail at longer zoom ranges. In fact, at 25x zoom, which is actually where iPhone sort of gives up, it is very, very average. And if you look at it, Samsung and Vivo have different kinds of processing for the longer zoom range shots. And I kind of actually prefer Samsung's over Vivo's. In fact, it actually looks more realistic even at 30x, even at 60x and 100x. Now, in low light zoom comparison, things start getting interesting. Interestingly, iPhone captures the most amount of details in 2x shots followed by Samsung and then Vivo. At 3x, Samsung wins thanks to the native lens, but the iPhone is no slouch either. Vivo loses here again. But Vivo at 3.7x low light is just wow. In comparison, Samsung does a decent job, but iPhone is the worst here. At 5x, I expected an easy win for Samsung and iPhone, but that's not really the case. Vivo actually wins and it is fantastic here. Of course, Samsung is also pretty good, but I can't say the same for the iPhone. And at 10x, again, Vivo takes the crown. Overall, when you look at telephoto performance, I would actually pick Samsung over Vivo and then iPhone would be my last choice, of course. The Galaxy S25 Ultra's selfies are fantastic. You get great skin tones and superb details as well. Vivo adds too much contrast here. But when it comes to selfie portraits and HDR selfie pictures, I think Vivo does it better. And that's generally been the story for the entire video where multi-stack processing on Vivo is better. Low light selfies with the night mode on are superb on Samsung, followed by the iPhone and then Vivo. Vivo needs to really get rid of the AI extreme night mode for selfies. All right, moving on to 4K 60fps video recording, Apple and Vivo can shoot Dolby Vision, where Samsung now does HLG HDR. The bitrate is higher on Samsung, as you can tell, plus the quality of the footage and HDR tuning is fantastic too. Even the sound recording quality is superior on Samsung compared to even the iPhone, which was surprising to me. Now we are recording a video using all the three phones in HDR and this is what the quality looks like. We're walking with the phones. Let me know what you guys think of the stabilization and the quality of the footage itself. The iPhone would be the second best, according to me, in terms of video recording in daylight. The problem with Vivo's video recording, which is good otherwise, is that the stabilization is not up to the mark. Now, not just HDR, when we compared the HDR video recording, we had similar thoughts as well. I would pick Samsung first, followed by iPhone and then Vivo. Take a look at it for yourself. But when you switch to low light, iPhone is still the best when it comes to video recording. Vivo comes in a close second and Samsung comes in third. Yes, the S25 Ultra has better video now compared to the S24 Ultra, but it's still not enough to beat its competition. All the three can also shoot 4K 60fps using the selfie camera, but the HDR tuning is better on the X200 Pro and the S25 Ultra compared to the 16 Pro Max. But the audio quality is similar level and similar quality on all the three. Now, my favorite here is the S25 Ultra, followed by the Vivo and then iPhone. And I'll pan around slightly. This is what it looks like against the light. Now we're recording a video using the 4K 60fps camera. So now I'm recording a 4K 60fps selfie video using the S25 Ultra. Ultimate video quality on the iPhone is the best, followed very closely by Samsung and then Vivo. Now when you're talking about zoom, the smoothest zoom when you actually use the slider, it's on the iPhone, but Vivo and Samsung can actually zoom longer. Samsung also has the new smooth zoom feature in the camera app, which actually doesn't have the greatest quality, but it's really smooth zoom though. Now while the smoothest zoom experience is on the iPhone, when you look at the quality, Samsung and Vivo offer better quality footage compared to the iPhone. iPhone's Achilles heel, not just in pictures but also in videos, turns out to be telephoto. Cinematic videos and portrait blur are superb on the iPhone. You can do it at 4K 30fps on all the three, but the iPhone definitely does a fantastic job considering it's got automatic focus switching. But you know what, Vivo can also do it. In fact, I felt it was smoother at focus switching compared to the iPhone, but the only advantage on the iPhone, and in fact even on the Samsung when you shoot portrait or cinematic video, is the fact that you can actually shoot HDR. So for overall quality in cinematic video, of course I'd pick the iPhone followed by Samsung and then Vivo. This time around, I also captured videos using the Instagram app just to see why everybody prefers the iPhone for using Instagram. And that's when I noticed something very interesting, is that when you capture videos using the Instagram app, it shoots at 1080p 30fps on all the three phones. But the video bitrate is higher on the iPhone, and that is why you get better quality video recording, as you can see for yourself. Log video recording is also possible on all the three now, but the iPhone with ProRes captures a mad amount of details. Just take a look at the difference in bitrate between the three. It's mind-boggling. And this is true for both the audio and the video bitrate, by the way. You know what, it's absolutely impossible for me to crown one phone as the camera king. So let me just break down my findings for you, and probably that will make it easier for you to make your decision as to which one you would like to pick. Now, when you look at the Vivo X200 Pro, it is the king of zoom images in low light, but more importantly, it is the king of portraits and HDR. And this is where Vivo's computational photography algorithm is class apart now. The multi-stack processing is leaving, you know, giants like Apple, Samsung, and Google behind. And it's also a proper pro photographer's tool. For example, you've got that humanistic street mode where you can actually take it to the street and make images that look like this. After using the X200 Pro, I'm really curious to see what the X200 Ultra brings to the table. The iPhone 16 Pro Max, thanks to that 24 MP outputs that you get with it, is still the king of details, and it is also the overall champion when it comes to video recording. It's a very reliable camera that rarely ever disappoints for the general consumer. And not just the general consumer, it can turn into a pro tool when it wants to, considering you get stuff like ProRes video, which just captures so much more detail than other log footage that I have used till date, which is precisely the reason why filmmakers trust the iPhone to make an entire movie out of it for Hollywood, no less. And now for the Galaxy S25 Ultra, it's the new zoom and selfie king, at least according to my analysis. Samsung obviously hasn't upgraded the camera much on the S25 Ultra, but it has made useful tweaks to the algorithm to improve the image quality like I mentioned before. And it's also pretty good with the kind of AI implementation that it has going. I know that AI feels like an abused word, but the audio eraser function is actually damn good here. I do have constructive feedback for all the brands. Firstly, for Vivo, I would say that try to control the skin whitening issues in the portrait mode. And more importantly, also there is a, you know, scope for improvement in videography even more, but I'm sure that you're on your way to fixing that. As for Apple and Samsung, these two brands definitely need to be a little more risk taking in terms of the kind of hardware upgrades they make. There are a couple of components inside that are getting really old now. All right. So with all of this information that you have with you, which one of these three is your favorite camera phone? Let me know in the comment section below, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Until then, keep tracking and stay safe.