Insta360 One Hands on review, a pocket 360 degree camera

Creating 360 degree videos back then usually involves several cameras recording at the same time with a special mount and requires some advanced video editing skills. But now you can buy cheap peripherals to attach on your phone to make such videos with a massive viewing angle, here’s one of them. The Insta360 One.

Design

The insta360 One comes with a shell that covers the front and rear camera which also doubles as its mounting stand, and the peculiar looking device itself has an odd placement for both of the cameras. You can record videos while placing it on the shell although you’ll have to plug it to your phone to view the recordings via the pop-out lightning connector which means it only works for Apple phones.

Memory won’t be problem for it has an SD card storage with a 128 GB capacity so you don’t have to worry about losing some of your precious iPhone memory storage. At the very corner of the phone is a tripod thread which lets you mount the device on things like a selfie stick, a blue tooth remote, drones and of course an ordinary tripod. It’s also where you’ll attach a small string for the bullet time feature which we’ll get to later.

Software

Before attaching the device to your iPhone, head over to the Play store do download the Insta360 One app for free and the Insta360 Studio on your pc which you can find on their website. When taking a photo or video, you can view both either through flat mode which looks like your usual photo or video distorted to fit in a single screen, the rectilinear mode which stich the shot to mirror what the human eye sees in 360, you regular fish eye mode, the vloggers favorite little planet and the crystal ball. Which all can be used in a single video through the free capture mode in the Insta360 One app on your phone.

Like we mentioned before, there is a string where you can attach to the Insta360 to help you with the bullet-time feature which you’ll have to literally whirl the device around you to achieve the effect. The bullet time records 240 frames per second with a 720p quality, of course it is recommended to be activated around open areas to avoid collision and you’ll have to whirl at your own risk pretty much. You might be wondering how this device can record steadily with all that motion happening. The Insta360 One has a six axis stabilization so shooting on the go would not be much of a problem.

There’s also a smart track option in the app to focus on a moving subject while recording, another result of how effective the camera’s stabilization is. Now let’s head on over to the down side of this device. Because it uses 2 separate cameras, you’ll notice some unclear stiches while you pan around a video or a photo but is not that noticeable unless you look closely or have different lighting sources. Another is how bad the camera takes in direct sunlight which will be an issue since this camera is mostly used outdoors. Lastly are the very obvious noise in both photo and video when shooting at night time or even at low lit scenarios.

Verdict

We’d say it’s a good portable 360 camera for its price, not only for easy use and reliability also for its versatility in outputs. Some Smartphones may produce better photo and video, but the insta360 sure does the job with its amazing results.