Vivo first proposed the concept of a soft light ring flash. In just one and a half years, it developed two iterative products, transitioning from manually adjusting color temperature to automatically adjusting both color temperature and brightness. We can assert that changes in the form of smartphone flashes were truly witnessed in vivo S series mobile phones.
At the end of 2023, vivo created a studio-level soft light ring capable of real-time distance detection of portraits. It intelligently adjusts the soft light brightness to create softer and more uniform light and shadow, establishing a solid foundation for excellent skin quality when capturing portraits. The Dimensity 9200+, a flagship chip from MediaTek with a 4nm architecture released in mid-2023, has found widespread use in performance-focused or flagship mobile phones, such as the iQOO Neo8 Pro and vivo X90s.
Currently, vivo has incorporated this once top-notch chip into its portrait-focused mobile phones. After 20 months of meticulous adjustments, it has achieved industry-leading performance.
The protagonist of our test today is the vivo S18 Pro, a portrait phone that integrates the aforementioned functions and performance. It not only surpasses the boundaries of portrait phone performance but also introduces an ultra-large-capacity battery into a body less than 8mm thick. Among portrait phones priced at 3,000 yuan, it stands out as the thinnest and lightest phone that captures the best portrait photos delivers the highest performance, and boasts the longest battery life.
Before delving into the review, let’s explore the key features of the vivo S18 Pro:
The thin and light portrait camera is equipped with the Dimensity 9200+ flagship SoC for the first time.
The vivo S18 Pro introduces the Dimensity 9200+ flagship platform into the realm of thin and light portrait phones. Paired with LPDDR5X memory + UFS3.1 storage, it emerges as the best portrait phone in terms of performance.
In terms of imaging, the main camera and ultra-wide-angle lens of the vivo S18 Pro directly inherit the CMOS of the X100. The main camera employs a 1/1.49-inch outsole IMX920 sensor, while the ultra-wide-angle lens features a 50-megapixel Samsung S5KJN1 sensor, combined with 2 times the IMX663. This marks the first time the full-focus imaging system has reached the ceiling level among thin and light portrait phones.
The S18 Pro houses a built-in 5000mAh battery in a body measuring only 7.45mm. Compared with the previous generation S17 Pro, the battery capacity has increased by 8.7%, and it is 12% thinner than the average thickness of other 5000mAh mobile phones in the industry.
Design & Appearance
The vivo S18 Pro features a 6.78-inch high-quality OLED screen on its front, boasting a static contrast ratio of 8000000:1 and a local peak brightness reaching up to 2800nits. This level of screen quality is uncommon among mobile phones focusing on portrait photography.
The pixel arrangement reveals that the S18 Pro incorporates a BOE screen with a resolution of 2800 × 1260, achieving 1.5K quality. The screen offers a standard PPI of 452, with an OLED equivalent PPI of around 370. Centered at the top of the S18 Pro, a 50-megapixel ultra-light-sensitive portrait lens integrates seamlessly. LED soft lights flank the front lens on both sides.
Vivo has employed COP packaging technology for the phone’s screen, resulting in a bottom frame that visually matches the top’s width, enhancing the daily viewing experience.
The S18 Pro introduces an industry-first relief carving process. The back features 13 million tangent lines and 256 horizontal sections in 30μm wide lines, creating a three-dimensional carving resembling petals. These intricately carved petals spring to life under light, offering an artistic beauty.
Vivo also debuts Yunjin glass technology. The glass back panel meticulously arranges over 4 million micron-level square diamonds, yielding a frosted-like feel. This texture not only maintains the glass’s smoothness but also effectively resists fingerprint marks.
Inspired by window designs, the S18 Pro’s lens module adopts a style reminiscent of two square windows with rounded corners, evoking a sense of water and light. The lens group’s four sides curve gracefully, with 2.5D glass on the surface, creating an impression of water on the verge of spilling over.
The S18 Pro’s ring flash dynamically adjusts warm and cold color temperatures and brightness based on the external environment. This feature not only expands the lighting area but also enhances the color temperature adjustment range by nearly 1/5.
Remarkably thin, the vivo S18 Pro measures just 7.45mm in thickness. A noise reduction microphone sits atop the phone, while a single speaker, a Type-C interface, a microphone pickup port, and a SIM card slot line the bottom. The S18 Pro package includes a transparent silicone phone case, an 80W fast charging set, a quick start guide, and a SIM card pin.
Cameras
The main camera of the vivo S18 Pro employs the Sony IMX920 sensor, the same sensor as the X100. It features a 1/1.49-inch photosensitive unit, a single pixel size of 1µm, an f/1.88 aperture, and boasts flagship-level OIS Hummingbird super anti-shake support.
The telephoto portrait lens utilizes a 12-megapixel Sony IMX663 sensor, a 1/2.93-inch photosensitive unit, a 1.22μm single pixel, and provides support for 2x optical zoom.
The ultra-wide-angle lens shares the same 50-megapixel Samsung S5KJN1 as the vivo X100. It comes with a 1/2.76-inch photosensitive unit, 0.64µm single pixel, and supports a 109° FOV.
Now, let’s explore its imaging capabilities by examining the actual samples.
Main Photographer
In daytime scenes, the main camera captures ample light. During shooting, it operates in sharp mode, defaulting to the vivid mode.
In the actual test, the resulting image appears transparent and bright, maintaining Vivo’s characteristic high-saturation adjustment. While most find the sample aesthetically pleasing, personal preferences for true colors vary. In response, vivo has integrated three color modes—vivid, texture, and natural—allowing users to switch according to their preferences.
In night scene mode, the support of Hummingbird OIS optical image stabilization significantly enhances film yield. Even when capturing a night scene with one hand, it accurately captures direct light without whitening. The resulting image balances brightness and darkness, offsetting most noise in dark areas. The night sky is rendered purely. The IMX920 in the X100 excels in capturing night scenes.
Telephoto
In daytime scenes, the telephoto lens, thanks to the robust ISP of Dimensity 9200+, delivers excellent resolution. In 2x mode, the image is clean and sharp, effectively avoiding interference from cluttered objects. The telephoto lens exhibits color saturation adjustment equivalent to the main camera, ensuring a consistent visual effect.
Super Wide Angle
The 50-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens demonstrates ample resolving power, maintaining clarity even when zoomed in. Default correction eliminates barrel distortion, and both ends of the picture remain blur-free. It is well-suited for recording ultra-wide images in daily life.
Portrait
The built-in 2x telephoto lens of the vivo S18 Pro captures portraits with exquisite quality, displaying every detail.
In comparison to other phones with an over-whitening effect through AI, portraits taken by the vivo S18 Pro exhibit more three-dimensional facial features. The skin color appears natural and pure, devoid of artificial traces, creating a sense of reality and closeness.
Performance and Gaming
Nearly 1.57 million people can smoothly play high-definition Genshin Impact thanks to the Dimensity 9200+ AnTuTu chipset.
The Vivo S18 Pro, a thin and light mobile phone, incorporates MediaTek’s top flagship chip of 2023, the Dimensity 9200+. This elevates the phone’s performance to match that of the medium-sized flagship X90s.
Utilizing TSMC’s N4P process technology, the CPU comprises one 3.35GHz Cortex-X3 large core, three 3.0GHz Cortex-A715 large cores, and four 2.0GHz Cortex-510 energy-efficient cores. The GPU features an 11-core Mali G715 running at 1.15GHz.
Our top version of the S18 Pro comes with 16GB+512GB, standard with LPDDR5X 8533Mbps memory and UFS3.1 flash memory.
Next, we enable the phone’s performance mode, turn off the memory expansion function, and conduct a series of theoretical performance tests.
Performance Testing
The S18 Pro scores nearly 1.57 million points in AnTuTu’s comprehensive performance test, a more than 60% increase over the Dimensity 8200 in the previous generation S17 Pro.
In the CPU single test, it achieves a Geekbench6 single-core score of 2128 points and a multi-core score of 5683 points, marking year-on-year increases of 76.6% and 63.6%, respectively.
In six 1080P tests in GFXBench, the highest improvement is approximately 74.7% over the previous generation.
In terms of dual U performance, the Vivo S18 Pro matches the top flagship mobile phones from 2022 to the first half of 2023. We then test the phone’s flash memory and memory performance.
In the Androbench flash memory test, the S18 Pro’s read and write speeds are 2086.69MB/s and 1593.74MB/s, respectively, consistent with the UFS3.1 specification. With LPDDR5X 8533Mbps memory, the measured copy speed is about 18.3GB/s, and the write speed is about 43.5GB/s.
Game Testing
For the game testing segment, we choose two games with different load levels, “Honor of Kings” and “Genshin Impact”. We test them by prioritizing frame rate in a 25 degrees Celsius indoor office environment, recording frame rate, power consumption, energy efficiency, and heat emission during gameplay.
King of Glory
In the Honor of Kings mobile game test, with high-definition image quality and extremely high frame rate, the average frame rate stabilizes at 118.8FPS, with an average fluctuation of only 0.7FPS. We hardly notice any fps stuttering during the game.
The average power consumption is about 3.3W, with a frame energy consumption of 28.2mW, resulting in an energy efficiency ratio of 35.5FPS/W. This is comparable to most performance phones equipped with Dimensity 9200+.
We also monitor the phone’s temperature performance. The maximum front temperature is 37.9 degrees Celsius, and the maximum back temperature is 38.4 degrees Celsius. Achieving this in a slim body is notable.
Genshin Impact
In the high-load Genshin Impact mobile game, at the highest image quality and 60 frame mode, the average frame rate during map running and monster hunting tests is 58.9FPS, with an average fluctuation of only 2FPS. The frame rate remains extremely stable among thin and light mobile phones.
The power consumption is about 5.1W, with a frame energy consumption of 86.6mW and an energy efficiency ratio of 11.55FPS/W. Compared to the previous generation S17 Pro, the energy efficiency ratio has improved by about 10%.
Regarding temperature, the maximum front and back temperatures are 40.3 degrees Celsius and 40.2 degrees Celsius, respectively. The S18 Pro maintains its coolness despite its thinness and lightness, thanks to its 1,500 metal wire-woven bionic heat dissipation net and the largest ever 4,023 square millimeters VC area in the S series, ensuring the S18 Pro’s full flagship performance.
Battery
The vivo S18 Pro features a 5000mAh ultra-large capacity battery, seamlessly integrated into its slim, 7.45mm body, and supports 80W Yuanhang flash charging.
Regarding this, we conducted a series of tests on the S18 Pro’s charging capacity and battery life.
Charging Test
The screen-off charging test begins with the phone at 1% battery. Within 10 minutes, it charges to 32%, reaches 63% in 20 minutes, hits 87% in 30 minutes, and achieves a full charge in 41 minutes.
Endurance Test
We employed Kuai Technology’s professional battery life testing tool, Battery Dog, for the battery life test.
The test automatically includes the 20% power test and checks all items such as CPU high voltage, CPU multi-threading, AI recognition, picture browsing, video playback, and web browsing. This simulates user usage scenarios, closely mimicking real load conditions and power consumption.
To maintain consistent environmental variables across all models and ensure test accuracy, Battery Dog automatically sets the screen brightness to 50%, disables automatic brightness adjustment, and sets the volume to 30%.
Battery Dog’s continuous and uninterrupted testing showed that the S18 Pro’s power dropped from 100% to 20% in 5 hours, 42 minutes, and 24 seconds. This translates to a full battery life of nearly 7 hours, sufficient for daily activities such as video watching and web browsing, even under light usage.
Verdict
A photography phone that focuses on portraits often does not need powerful performance and long battery life. Generally, it only requires outstanding lens quality and excellent portrait algorithms. However, the vivo S18 Pro is different and demands both. The release of powerful performance and sufficient battery life has given birth to this generation of portrait machines with almost no shortcomings.
After our testing, we summarized the vivo S18 Pro as follows:
Whenever you become accustomed to protruding cameras, and thick and heavy imaging flagships, and shift your attention to the vivo S18 Pro, you will be surprised by its thinness and lightness.
When you see the S18 Pro, you will experience an unprecedented sense of comfort. The embossed craftsmanship makes you fall in love with the phone as you hold it in your hand. You even want to touch it with your other hand and feel it carefully. The delicate feel of Yunjin’s warp and weft lines.
The imaging system, at the same level as the flagship machine, combined with Vivo’s portrait algorithm, can achieve beautiful skin in portraits while retaining more details of the characters.
Furthermore, with multi-color temperature ring soft light, a wide range of fill light angles, and an intelligent color-changing system, you no longer need to work hard to adjust camera parameters and angles at any time and in any scene. You can easily take satisfactory photos of your girlfriend. Portrait proofs, this is also the biggest advantage brought by vivo S18 Pro.
In terms of performance, the vivo S18 Pro is top-notch. In the actual measurement of the Dimensity 9200+, the high image quality of Yuanshin is stable at 58.9FPS, but the temperature is only over 40 degrees Celsius. While satisfying my girlfriend’s needs, I can no longer play games. I feel that the card, 5000mAh battery, and battery life fully meet the needs of a day of use. It should be said that the S18 Pro has achieved a perfect trade-off between portraits, performance, and battery life for the first time.
Although it lacks dual speakers, no infrared remote control, and compromises on some functions, as a portrait phone, the IMX920 main camera of the same model as Dimensity 9200+ and vivo X100 is enough to make up for these shortcomings. With its ultra-thin and light body, exquisite feel, and superb battery life, the vivo S18 Pro is not only a portrait phone, but you can even use it as your main phone.
For young people who like to take selfies and love games, the vivo S18 Pro is a hot model in the 3,500 yuan price range, so don’t miss it.
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