Wrap-up
If you were hoping for a straightforward ‘this is the best cameraphone’ outcome, we’re going to have to disappoint you. Summing up four to five cameras’ worth of photos and video across several shooting scenarios in a single verdict is as impossible as it is disinformative. Listing winners in each category is meaningless because not all shooting scenarios we compare have the same importance or value to the user. Plus, we already established that three of the five phones come with significant usability tradeoffs unrelated to their camera greatness, so it becomes an even longer and more complicated conversation.
vivo X200 Ultra • Huawei Pura 80 Ultra • Xiaomi 15 Ultra • Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra • Oppo Find X8 Ultra
If, however, you’re ready and willing to delve deep and examine the pros and cons of each of the Ultra smartphones included in this comparison, we believe the samples here are a solid foundation for finding out which of those is the best camera for you.
Starting from there, you could try to rationalize why importing the vivo and living with its Chinese software is a perfectly okay decision. Or why Huawei’s sort of Google-less software and several-year-old chipset are irrelevant when you can have great portraits and a changeable aperture on the main camera (for whatever reason you can come up with). Or maybe you were eyeing the Xiaomi Ultra, but despite its wide-ranging capabilities, the fixed-focus selfie camera is enough of a dealbreaker.
We learned a few things along the way, too. For example, we can’t say we’re fully enthusiastic about any of the smartphones from the standpoint of video capture. We’re mostly a stills photography-inclined bunch, but we can appreciate a high-quality video just as much as the next person, and all the Ultras in here appear to be lacking.
Oppo Find X8 Ultra • Huawei Pura 80 Ultra • Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra • Xiaomi 15 Ultra • vivo X200 Ultra
Another thing that became apparent was that unusual hardware doesn’t necessarily bring major principal advantages. The vivo’s 35mm main camera is great, but its results can be matched by other means without sacrificing performance at other important focal lengths. The Huawei’s dual-lens telephoto approach is great for headlines, but is it really offering that big of a benefit over two single cameras or even over one very good one?
This context also brought to light the realization that Xiaomi’s 200MP second telephoto is perhaps underdelivering. Additionally, poring over hundreds of images did make it abundantly clear that the Galaxy isn’t nearly as nice a cameraphone as we would have liked – sure, it may be a good enough cameraphone in addition to its other virtues, but it’s not nearly at the forefront in the camera field.
In the end, our takeaway is that, as with most other aspects of life, no one phone is the best at all tasks. But the good thing is that there are spectacular cameras that you can pack in your pocket and the tradeoffs when picking one over another are getting slimmer. Now if only all the big-name Chinese companies would make their Ultras globally available… Oh well, maybe next year.