This phone brings "soft light ring" and a brand-new Sony sensor for better photos

There's a phone duo coming that takes care of what's most important in photography – light. The upcoming Vivo S19 and S19 Pro will come with something called a "soft light ring" – as the name suggests, this will be a mini light ring that will soften the light.

Soft light matters. Trust me.

As someone who takes portraits every now and then, I've often rebelled against the laws of physics. I mean, how hard is it to construct a universe where it's always sunset? After all, that's when the light is so good for portraits – when the sun is close to the horizon, the light is softer, warmer, and more flattering.

You know this yourself – taking pictures of people at noon is almost always horrible.

Back to the Vivo S19 duo, though.

The Vivo S19 and S19 Pro will be powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 and the MediaTek Dimensity 9200+, respectively. The S19 features a large 6000mAh battery, while the S19 Pro has a slightly smaller 5500mAh battery.

Both models support 80W charging. The S19 Pro will have a 6.78″ 2800 x 1260 OLED display, 16GB RAM, and 512GB storage.

Confirming earlier leaks, Jia Jingdong stated that the S19 Pro includes the industry’s first 50-megapixel Sony IMX921 sensor, another 50MP Sony sensor for telephoto (with 50x digital zoom), and an "anti-distortion wide-angle double soft light selfie" camera.

Both the S19 and S19 Pro feature 50MP front cameras and 8MP ultrawide cameras.

The "soft light ring" in the camera module is designed to evenly fill light on the subject and reduce excessive shadows. When using the main camera, it spreads light over a wide area, and when using the telephoto lens, it narrows the beam to illuminate distant objects. This technology aims to provide ideal light distribution, texture, and color temperature for various scenes.

The Vivo S19 series also includes "synchronized focus change" for more reliable autofocus. Additionally, the series incorporates the latest self-developed portrait algorithms. Vivo has used supervised machine learning to encode a preference for "beautiful things" into the imaging AI's objective function.