The real reason to care about Vivo’s latest phone is the camera [Gallery]

The Vivo V80 sports flagship design quality, a massive 7200mAh battery, Center-Stage selfie camera, IP68/69 ingress protection, and one of the wildest AI camera modes I’ve seen yet. When I think of the smartphone industry’s best cameras, Vivo or Oppo usually comes to mind. While both companies offer good experiences on any phone they sell, their best features often appear only on flagship models. But the Vivo V80, which retails for just ₹62,999 (~$660), features the company’s new flagship AI camera mode, and that might be the single most interesting thing about the release for me. Let’s get the full specs out of the way first. The Vivo V80’s got a 6.59-inch 144Hz OLED display, featuring 1.5k resolution, true 10-bit colors (no dithering), and 4320Hz PWM dimming at low brightness (plus an option for full DC dimming). Inside is a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, 8GB RAM, and that massive 7200mAh battery with 90W charging. Good stuff. The Vivo V80 uses a main 50MP Sony LYTIA 700V sensor, a 3x optical 50MP Sony IMX882 telephoto camera, an 8MP or 12MP ultrawide camera (region-dependent), and a 50MP ZEISS center-stage 90-degree selfie camera. The phone is available in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other regions in the coming weeks. To illustrate just how interesting the new AI Creation camera mode is, I took a bunch of photos using the same mode on the Vivo X500. That phone is about $300 more expensive, but it features the same AI Creation mode as the Vivo V80. The results are nothing short of jaw-dropping at times. Let’s start with the hike I took this weekend. It was a gorgeous autumn day, but the sporadic cloud cover was really killing the vibe of my photos. The lighting was annoyingly flat, and the colors my eyes were seeing in the leaves weren’t being picked up on camera at all. So I swiped over to the AI Creation mode and hit the shutter button. The rest was all automated. The amount of depth and color this mode added truly blew my mind. When you open the mode and point the viewfinder toward something, it scans the scene and automatically applies the style it thinks will be best. It’ll also give you two additional modes to quickly select from, or you can jump into the full UI and choose the one you want. From here, you can also choose to have Vivo’s AI automatically remove anyone in the photo, and it does an impeccable job, too; no circling required! Original images are always available in Vivo’s Albums app, and you can select a different style after taking the photo. This mode is 100% cloud processing, though, so you might need to wait to see the processing results if you were somewhere like I was with no signal. Processing takes about one minute per photo, and up to 10 images can be processed simultaneously. If there’s a processing limit per day, I didn’t find it. While the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 in the Vivo V80 could probably handle some of the processing, this ensures you get the best quality without much wait time. The “Travel” category creates genuinely convincing effects like the Sunlight style. Vivo has several other options that are more dramatic and, therefore, obviously edited-looking. In the header image, I grabbed one of my son’s swords and asked him to take a picture of me. The sword and the room are fully real in these pictures, but the lighting and effects are all automatically generated by Vivo. All of these, too, were quite convincing, despite obviously being stylized. I particularly love the mist one, although I’m not sure how often anyone would use most of these. They’re clearly only for niche dramatic photos, but hey, maybe you love that sort of thing. The rest of the options available under the “Landscape” category were initially convincing, but zooming in just a bit reveals some very obvious AI editing. So all of this is amazing, but there’s one big problem that I’m not thrilled about: Vivo doesn’t use SynthID or another more standardized way of noting that these images are edited with AI. If you delve into the EXIF data, you can find “ai_creation” in the comments field, but Gemini apparently isn’t smart enough to understand that yet. Most likely, Gemini and the rest will figure this out in time, but I don’t care much for AI editing tools that don’t automatically mark them as such. Vivo, if you’re reading this, please add SynthID or another way for AI tools to identify these as automated. Otherwise, this is a dope mode that I love seeing proliferate to more affordable phones like the Vivo V80, especially in the age of RAMageddon. Follow Nick: YouTube, X (Twitter), Threads, Instagram FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.