Insta360 ONE X camera bundle for iPhone

Insta360 ONE X camera bundle for iPhone

Want to shoot 360° ‘virtual reality’ photos and videos? Insta360’s new ONE X is the latest in this field.

We checked out the ONE X camera bundle a kit containing everything you need, including a monopod and a bullet-time handle with mini tripod legs.

The ONE X captures everything around it at once, thanks to a pair of fisheye lenses poking out of each side of the compact body. There are two multifunction buttons and a small screen that shows the current shooting mode and settings. Just hold the camera up and press the shutter button to grab a 360° photo or begin a 360° video. This does mean your thumb is prominent at the bottom of the shot, but that’s easy to avoid; simply use the monopod and the iOS app to control the camera remotely.

The ONE X captures spherical 360° photos and video. Its photo resolution is 6080x3040 pixels and video resolution is an impressive 5.7K (5760x2880) at 30fps. It can shoot in log recording mode, which will please video specialists, and it can capture photos in raw as well as JPEG formats.

But it’s the additional capabilities that make the camera really shine: it has impressive gyro-based stabilisation even when live streaming 360° content to YouTube, Facebook and other platforms, and it delivers stitched or unstitched media to suit your production needs. There’s a removable battery, a

MicroSD card slot, a compact tripod handle and a pole that doubles as a bullet time (‘frozen moment’) spinning video rig.

Manual shutter and ISO settings can be used for both photo and video shooting, and the FlowState stabilisation feature is particularly impressive at smoothing out shakes and wobbles.

Studio edits The camera makes its own Wi-Fi hotspot, so you can operate it from a distance. This also means you can transfer large videos to an iPhone directly, there’s no need to tether it to your Mac to offload footage. Once footage is captured it will need trimming and possibly other adjustments.

Insta360 Studio for ONE X is a free videoediting tool for macOS that helps produce finished footage from your captured clips. It’s currently in beta and it could do with a few more features, although it handles the FlowState image stabilisation and direction locking very well. There’s also a plugin for Adobe Premiere users.

For quick edits, the Insta360 ONE X app acts as a surprisingly capable editor as well as camera controller. In fact, you may find this is all you need, at least most of the time – unless you go for the option of shooting photos in raw or capturing video in log mode. Raw photos can’t be edited in the iOS app (although fortunately it always shoots a JPEG version at the same time), and log mode video needs desktop-level processing to look natural.

Big features, small size The ONE X is useful for ‘overcapture’ as well as regular 360° shooting. This is where the final video is reframed as a regular one from the 360° footage in the editing software. Other video features include shooting for Google Street View, hyperlapse slow-motion editing, frame rates of up to 100fps (the resolution drops to 3K for this) and live streaming of regular content (overcapture style, where you change the view direction on the fly from your phone) as well as full 360° video.

The camera is small enough to slip easily into a shirt pocket, so it’s also small enough to poke into tiny spaces to capture shots that boggle the imagination. It always knows which way is up whatever angle you use – again, it’s capable of this even when live-streaming 360° video to social media sites.

The bullet-time handle is odd, but it’s also a lot of fun; the monopod connects to its side with the ONE X at the other end, and you twirl it around your head while shooting video. The ‘time slice’ results from this are nothing short of staggering.

Taking HDR and manual control options into account, the quality is as good as other regular action cams such as the GoPro HERO7 Black. Factor in all the add-ons you get with this bundle and this is a very attractive package. best iphone buying guide 2017