Infinix Zero Ultra review: premium camera specs, midrange price, compromises

The Infinix Zero Ultra comes from a smartphone maker that many UK and US users may never have heard of. The China-based manufacturer has made a splash in other parts of the world, however, where the allure of quite eye-catching camera specs at affordable prices has helped the company gain a foothold, so now the UK market beckons. 

And what headline figures these are: A 200MP main camera with a 1/1.22" portrait camera, a macro cam and a 32MP front-facing selfie camera, with a Super Night mode that promises to catch night shots in quality that rivals the best of Samsung and Apple (the main camera has the same pixel figure as the newly released Samsung Galaxy S23, for example). 

Along with superfast 180W charging, a widescreen 6.8-inch AMOLED waterfall screen and lots of power, you have the possibility of a giant slayer here.

And this comes in a package you can buy for under £500? If it delivers on all its promises, we're looking at the best camera phone for value on the entire market.

Intrigued, I received a unit to test and review over a period of several weeks, using it not just for photography, but for life and work too, using it for phone calls, life-admin apps and mobile gaming, to see how it works in real life.

And what I found was a camera phone with some premium specs, but also a small dollop of compromise. 

Infinix Zero Ultra review: Design

Many phones go for the nondescript black block approach, especially at more affordable price points, but not the Infinix Zero Ultra. It comes in two colour options, Genesis Noir (a mixture of matte black and striped-black design) and Coslight Silver, which has a white and silver back adorned with what Infinix calls the Kármán line, wavy patterns inspired by the boundary between Earth and space. It lends the phone a stylish flair that makes it stand out for me.

The 6.8-inch AMOLED screen is large and bright, and the waterfall design adds a further premium feel to the unit. Often with shiny phones like this, the offset is that they are super-prone to smudging, but the patterned back means you notice that a lot less here than on some other models, like the recent Oppo Reno 8 Pro. Still, with the waterfall screen causing a lot of accidental touching and interacting with the screen, along with the highly slippery nature of this beast, getting a protective cover is paramount. A basic clear one is included with the unit, and it provides good protection, although you might want to find something flashier if you are remotely style-conscious.  

Infinix Zero Ultra review: Features

The headline feature on the Infinix Zero Ultra is its hugely impressive camera specs. With a 200-megapixel main camera and a 32-megapixel front-facing selfie camera, along with a 13-megapixel ultrawide camera and a macro lens on the back, Infinix is matching or exceeding market frontrunners like the Samsung S23 Ultra (which has a 200, 12 and 12MP spec on its cameras, respectively). 

The '3D' waterfall AMOLED screen offers a max resolution of 2400 x 1024 and is really nice and bright too, with peak brightness of 900 nits, and the MediaTek Dimensity 920 processor runs off a 4,500mAh battery, which is only a slightly smaller one than the one keeping the S23 Ultra running. The MediaTek processor, however, is where the main money-saving here is made, and for good reason (jump to Performance to find out more). 

The battery can also be charged really rather fast with the included 180W charger, going from near-empty to full in under an hour for me. 

Infinix Zero Ultra review: Camera

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The camera is where the Infinix Zero Ultra shines brightest. The 200-megapixel main camera is a powerful beast, and delivers really sharp and crisp images in all light conditions. 

There are two general daytime image modes available in the camera, AI Cam and Beauty, aside from the Portrait and Super Macro. AI Cam is your regular camera setting, and I tended to use that for everyday use. Tapping the area of the screen to focus on worked really well and intuitively for me, and there were quick settings available for zoom too, 0.6, 1 (normal) and 2, but manual zooming for more precise operation was also smooth. 

I preferred the AI Cam over the Beauty mode mainly because Beauty tended to slightly oversaturate images, giving them a less natural, glossy feel (which may actually be preferable to the more Instagram-inclined among us), while Super Macro gave me decent but unspectacular close-up macros. However, what I was most impressed by were the Portrait and Super Night modes. The Portrait modes gave me true HDR-level snaps, where the subject really popped out of the background, and the aperture control was excellent too, for precise control of what to focus on. 

Super Night mode, meanwhile, gave me some of the best night shots I've captured on any budget or midrange phone, where it made excellent use of limited light sources to give me sharp and impressively grain-free images. 

Video is good too, with the native video app offering preset movie-making templates for quick and easy editing, ready for whatever social or video platform you use online. It's all fairly intuitive too, with onscreen guides, a plethora of native filters and even access to royalty-free music.

So far, so impressive. But surely, for this price, there's got to be a compromise somewhere...

Infinix Zero Ultra review: Performance

...and it's here. Where it comes to pure grunt, the makers of the Infinix Zero Ultra have decided to compromise when it comes to the processor. While most of the market-leading phones use Qualcomm Snapdragon processors (such as the 8 Gen 2 in the Samsung Galaxy S23), in order to offer this phone at such a low price, it's powered by a much less capable MediaTek Dimensity 920 processor. Coming through benchmark tests as providing less than half the power of the newer Snapdragon processor, the 8-core processor quickly starts to struggle under the demands of the modern creative smartphone user. 

Like most phones unfortunately do nowadays, the Zero Ultra comes rammed with preloaded apps, and here these consists of Infinix's own XOS ecosystem apps, such as XArena (for gaming), XClub (perks club), and the Palm Store, as well as the Hi Browser and native health, scanner, archiving apps, Hi Translate and more. 

All this takes up considerable space and memory, so when I had to add my own Google suite of apps and other preferred apps, the phone quickly started to feel mightily bloated. 

Which then started to lead to issues like a repeated restart loop, where the phone's memory got so overwhelmed that the phone forced itself into endless restarts, needing manual hard-reset intervention. In addition, apps would sometimes stop responding properly, with a restart again needed, as well as the wifi receptor being temperamental at best. 

This started to happen with fewer apps installed and a lower percentage of the storage occupied than I have on my own cheap 'runaround' phone and handy control sample, a last-last-gen Nokia, a phone that's slow, unimpressive but reliable. That tells me that Infinix seems to have built a phone where the underpinnings don't manage to support the eye-grabbing headline features reliably enough to fulfil the maker's ambition of a true giant slayer.

And that's unfortunate, because there is a lot to like about this phone.

Infinix Zero Ultra review: Price

And one of the things easiest to like about it is the price tag. Coming in at just over £400 in the UK, cheaper than the Google Pixel 7 and even the now-relatively ancient Apple iPhone 11, and similar to the Samsung Galaxy A53, which has inferior specs to the Zero Ultra by quite some margin (except the battery). The compromise, as stated above, to reach this price point, is the inferior processor, but if you're happy running light on apps and are looking first and foremost for camera specs, it should make the compromise worth it.

Should I buy the Infinix Zero Ultra?

If you're looking for a camera phone above all, and are happy to run light on apps (or willing to work with the niche suite of native apps included here), the Infinix Zero Ultra could constitute a real bargain for you. The camera performs really well and the ample number of megapixels comes in particularly handy to shoot attractive portraits and night shots, better than almost any other phone in its price bracket. But if you're someone who can't function without the full Google suite of apps, and require all the latest shopping, banking, social-media and life-admin apps running without fault, you should be wary of these mighty camera specs luring you in, as the underpowered processor struggles to keep the phone performing to its full potential.