Mobile photography is no longer a luxury but a basic and essential feature of every modern smartphone. The combination of a main camera, ultra-wide lens, and selfie camera is now standard across most devices, providing users with an immediate entry into photography.
But with the advent of the telephoto lens-a concept gaining new life in the mid-range market-a new horizon of possibilities has opened up. The question remains: How far can a telephoto lens really take you?
As the calendar’s third quarter wraps up, vivo Philippines is signaling a strong finish, launching its latest camera-centric device, the vivo V60, following the release of the V50 just last February.
Known as the company’s dedicated line for imaging innovation, the V60 promises to build on the success of its legacy model. It features a ZEISS-powered camera system, enhanced battery life, and smart AI capabilities designed to elevate the user experience.
After spending a week with the phone, here is my initial review of the vivo V60’s performance.
Design and Build Quality
The Berry Purple variant is, without a doubt, an aesthetic highlight. Its back panel features a frosted matte glass finish-a deliberate choice that emphasizes elegance and sleekness through simplicity, entirely foregoing distracting patterns or gradients. While the finish still catches light smudges when held, they aren’t very evident from a distance.
Coming from a smaller device, the V60’s dimensions of 163.53 × 76.96 × 7.65 mm initially felt substantial in the hand. However, the phone’s weight and balance quickly become manageable. While the width might make one-handed use challenging for some users, the overall grip comfort is excellent and is certainly not a dealbreaker.
The durability of the device is enhanced with the top-grade IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance ratings. This ensures the phone is resilient against everything from dust exposure and accidental water splashes to rain and even high-pressure water jets, bringing peace of mind for daily use.
Screen and audio experience
As someone who enjoys media consumption on a phone, the vivo V60’s display is surprisingly a highlight of the user experience. The wide-screen ratio, paired with ultra-narrow bezels and a 120 Hz refresh rate, makes the viewing experience fluidly responsive and highly immersive.
The V60’s AMOLED panel delivers high quality thanks to two key technologies: the P3 Cinema-Grade Wide Color Gamut, which provides a significantly broader palette of vivid, accurate colors, and HDR10+ Certification.
This combination ensures content is displayed with a high dynamic range, providing clear detail even in deep blacks and bright highlights, which is crucial for an enjoyable viewing experience of any series or video, supporting up to 4K resolution.
Furthermore, the V60 now boasts an impressive 5,000 nits of peak brightness, a substantial upgrade over its predecessor. This powerful brightness ensures the screen remains perfectly visible even under direct sunlight.
The immersive display is well complemented by the vivo V60’s Dual Stereo Speakers, which offer good audio performance. With speakers positioned on both the top and bottom of the device, the sound output is more even and balanced.
When watching content like live music performances, the sound quality truly shines, delivering good bass response, clear details in harmonies and vocals, and precise separation of instrument tracks.
Crucially, even when the volume is maxed out, the audio quality remains clear and uncompromised, avoiding any harsh or ‘blown-out’ distortion.
Camera performance
The camera system is arguably the highlight of the vivo V60 experience. It is now equipped with a powerful quad-camera array featuring ZEISS-optimized lenses: a 50MP ZEISS OIS Main Camera, a 50MP ZEISS Super Telephoto Camera, an 8MP ZEISS Ultra Wide-Angle Camera, and a 50MP ZEISS Group Selfie Camera.
The 50MP Main Camera delivered consistently high-quality, clear photos in bright conditions, capturing subjects with impressive crispness and detail. As expected, low-light performance saw some compromises; while images remained visible at night, details occasionally appeared softened or pixelated.
The 8MP Ultra Wide-Angle Camera is useful for capturing large groups or expansive landscapes, producing images with good, necessary detail. However, users should note that the ultra-wide sensor, common to most phones, is not the optimal choice for low-light environments, as image details tend to diminish significantly.
The 50MP ZEISS Super Telephoto Camera is the main highlight and a true game-changer in the mid-range category. Leveraging its optical zoom, I was able to capture clear and sharp photos of a volleyball match from a lower box section of the arena.
Pushing the zoom further to 100x still produced decent and recognizable images of the players and their teams from my distant seat. To manage expectations, remember that image quality inherently compromises as the digital zoom level increases, resulting in greater image wash-out and loss of detail.
The telephoto lens is also responsible for the phone’s dedicated Telephoto Portrait feature that introduces new 85mm and 100mm focal lengths. The portraits produced using these settings are noted for their sharpness and crisp details.
The 50MP ZEISS Group Selfie Camera is capable of capturing high-quality individual portraits with clear detail. For group selfies, however, there is a tendency for some faces on the edges to lose sharpness and appear slightly washed out.
Taking videos with the vivo V60 is equally efficient, providing clear visual quality and good accompanying audio.
Battery and Performance
Beyond the fluid 120Hz refresh rate, the vivo V60 delivers responsive and high-performance operation thanks to the powerful Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 processor. This chipset promises a 27% faster CPU and a 30% stronger GPU, which is further supported by a 12GB + 12GB Extended RAM configuration.
In practical use, intensive tasks pose no challenge. Playing graphically demanding games like Mobile Legends with settings maximized to ultra-high graphics was seamless. Furthermore, running multiple applications simultaneously resulted in no noticeable hiccups or lags.
To maintain optimal function during heavy use, the device incorporates an Ultra Large VC Smart Cooling System, which effectively ensures the phone’s temperature remains low during high-performing tasks.
When it comes to battery life, the vivo V60 is powered by a massive 6,500 mAh BlueVolt Battery, offering exceptional longevity regardless of user habits. In a test involving substantial usage-a total of 3 hours and 15 minutes of screen-on time, including 1 hour and 57 minutes of video playback, 19 minutes of gaming, and 26 minutes of camera use-the phone only consumed 30% of its total battery capacity from a full charge.
When it comes to recharging, the V60 proved to be fast, running from 0% to 100% in just 1 hour and 9 minutes.
Smart AI features
Adding more depth to the phone’s overall functionality, the vivo V60 integrates several subtle but useful Smart AI features designed to enhance photography and streamline content creation.
For post-processing, the V60 offers two powerful editing tools. The first is AI Erase 3.0, which allows users to seamlessly remove unwanted objects, people, or imperfections from photos with enhanced precision. The second is AI Magic Move, which enables creative manipulation and movement of elements within the image for easy composition changes directly on the device.
Meanwhile, the V60 also features the AI Image Expander, allowing you to intelligently widen your photos’ surroundings. Complementing this is the AI Four-Season Portrait, which lets you instantly transform the seasonal backdrop of your portraits for added ambiance effects.
In terms of capture assistance, the V60 features the AI Aura Light. Though slightly smaller than the one on its predecessor, the V50, this intelligent lighting system still effectively analyzes the scene and adjusts the intensity and color temperature of the rear flash.
With its smooth display, optimized performance, and exceptional battery life, the vivo V60 is already a strong value-for-money contender in the midrange market. However, its versatile set of cameras might just set this phone apart from its competitors. The Super Telephoto lens not only takes you far by capturing sharp details from extreme distances, but it also elevates your entire mobile photography experience, pushing capabilities far beyond typical midrange expectations.
The vivo V60 phones are priced at Php 28,999 for the 12 GB+256 GB variant, and Php 30,999 for the 12GB+512GB variant. Both are available for purchase at authorized Vivo stores nationwide. You can also check out online via the vivo e-store, Shopee, and TikTok Shop.