Hi all
Looking to pick up a 360 camera and wanted to see if anyone has had some good/bad/indifferent experience with a particular model. The front runners appear to be the Ricoh Theta series and the Samsung Gear 360. I've been looking at a couple of others as well such as the Xiaomi Mijia 360 and the Nikon Keymission.
Still pretty early days from a technology point of view but they seem to be getting better. Any thoughts welcome.
That's great info, I feel like Ricoh probably isn't getting as much press around their devices. Probably because all i really hear about with these sorts of cameras is Samsung Samsung Samsung. I was going to ask about the whole photosphere comparison. Taking them on my phone is a pain but it's good in that you/your feet don't really get captured compare to a 360 cam. Interesting that the quality isn't quite as good. Speed and convenience vs quality I suppose. How is the video quality? If you're not moving around does it stay fairly sharp? The examples I see on Youtube aren't bad.
Video looks better in the native app vs google/YT/fb, hard to describe how mainly pixel density and the spherical image.
The problem with the theta is often your hands can appear in the image so you need to use a mount of some kind (bottom has a standard screw mount) and a remote in one of the many apps.
BTW can also make things called tiny planets.
link to some photos and video. Google photos doesn't support 360 videos yet. Sigh.
im interested too.
not using samsung (but still android) so a bit hesitate to get gear 360 first edition.
also has budget constrain cant afford $300.
no using for video i just want to take cool 360 degree still photos (super fish eye type of photo).
found insta360 air but undecided.
found a lot at aliexpress too but worry about quality
Am I right in reading that the Gear 360 is only compatible with Samsung devices? I've seen it come up on Amazon for ~$150USD in the past couple of weeks with the new version about to drop.
copy pasted from previous gear 360 deal
To clarify:
Standalone: camera shoots 2x 180 degree fisheye images side by side onto a FAT32 microSD card, .jpg for stills, .avi MPEG-4 at 30fps for video. If you have the experience and software tools to work with those, it's usable with no other Samsung items.
Tethered wirelessly to a supported Samsung phone: the Samsung Gear Manager app lets you control the camera and see through its viewfinder. You can snap 360 stills, start and stop the video, change modes, transfer images to/from the camera for uploading to 360 image sharing services, Facebook etc. This app isn't great and hasn't received many updates (hey, it's Samsung) but does do the job of a remote shutter and back in the day I upgraded my Android phone to a Note 5 specifically so I could run it.
Tethered wirelessly to any Android or iPhone phone: you can connect via Wi-Fi and run Google StreetView to capture 360 stills at timed intervals. Put the Gear 360 on a monopod, hold it above your head, and pretend you are a Google StreetView car! Works well.
Connected to a PC (or Mac in BootCamp / virtual emulation): the included licensed PC software (nothing to do with Samsung) can import the fisheye format videos and stitch and edit them into full 360 degree equirectangular videos as used in VR applications. The resulting videos can be uploaded to YouTube or Facebook and viewed in a GearVR, Oculus, Vive, Daydream, etc, (or just just by panning with a finger or mouse on a 2D screen). Working with 360 video can be slow and tedious depending on your motivation.
Happy adventuring in 360 land!
Picked one up with the Telstra eBay deal. For $134 you can't go wrong. Cheers for your input
Congrats on picking one up. I would have been tempted to get one too if it wasn't expired already. Let us know how it goes.
360 Fly 4K?
Yeah it seems pretty popular. I was after a full 360 cam though, from what I can tell the 360 Fly cuts off the bottom part of the pic/vid. I did see they were going to bring out a drone with a camera on both bottom and top to create a perfect sphere without the drone in the pic, pretty cool.
I have the KeyMission 360. Not serious shooting but just to see what lies ahead technologically.
After watching a few final cuts, I came to my conclusion. It is excellent documenting, not useful for filming. Here's why.
Filming is about capturing the key essence of a scene. Things look different in person so we can never capture our overall experience. The closest we can come is to frame what's important and enhance as desired to recreate the visual experience. One of the most overlooked enhancement is playback speed.
Most 360 cams are only shooting in ~30fps. I'm not even sure if that's a true 30fps as the all in one 360 cams use one sensor to alternate between more than one lense. I find 30 fps barely sufficient for 1:1 playback so slow replay is out of the question.
Image sticthing isn't bad if you're using it as a 360 video, but if you to use snippets on a standard video, you will definitely see the seams.
Low light image requires IR flood lighting. Too dark otherwise.
Battery life isn't bad but not useful for opportunity shots. You'll need more than an hour of battery to keep the camera rolling for any meaningful period of time.
TLDR - if you're only using it to record the landscape periodically, it's good. It's not going to make exciting videos.
Excellent feedback, thanks tshow! Given the timeliness of the Gear 360 deal that just popped up on eBay I've ordered one of those. Cheap way to get used to the whole 360 thing. Very curious to see what GoPro comes out with later this year as I think there's huge potential for the medium, just a matter of getting the technology up to speed and the right content creators on board.
I think GoPro has lost the plot and I don't hold out for their products anymore.
I say this because their best product is the GoPro Hero 3+ and 4, and that's because of third party products, namely the bacpac batteries. You could shoot 1080p 60fps for about 4 hours continuously. This meant capturing many of those moments you wished you had the camera on.
Look at GoPro today. They are suing Pro Mounts over trademark infringement on the word "pro" and making cameras that do not integrate easily nor well with aftermarket innovations.
Still keen to see what GoPro does for 360, but I think GoPro is over.
Wall Street certainly thinks do. Stock keeps tanking.
I've got a theta sc. Wasn't really interested in other offerings from samsung and LG. I avoided keymission as the reviews were very bad on release.
Ricoh on the other hand has been out for a number of years and iterations. Fits pretty easily into pockets but I managed to drop my mine and scratched the lens (which bulge out). Difference between S and SC is recording time, 25 mins vs 5 mins. Both come with 8gb on board storage which is not upgradeable.
Photospheres are alright but not as good pixel density as a regular photosphere. Stitching is pretty good.
Software is decent as it supports iPhone and android. There's a multiple theta apps available for some reason and it is possible to use the google street view app (can transfer files but for me it loses some metadata and when uploaded to gphotos isn't displayed as a photosphere). Various options for exposure, live previes, time lapse etc although I haven't really played around with them.
Connecting to the device and transferring videos (through the app) are done via wifi direct. This can take a while and cannot close the app.
That's all I can think of at the top of my head. Let me know if you have more questions.
Edit: I bought mine for $360 (ebay with 10% off) and then got more back using TRS from a trip. So around $320.