A 360 Camera With A Little Something For Everyone
At their core, 360 cameras are fancy action cams. As such, the video quality you get from them is similar: bold colors, infinite focus and extra sharp. Fortunately, the current generation offers 8K, which means you can expect 4K when exporting flat video. The X6 offers a significant upgrade in image quality compared to the (also 8K) X5. It also convincingly bested the GoPro Max 2 in my testing. The X6 offers higher fidelity, less blurriness around the edges and more authentic color. The X6 definitely kills some of the traditional gripes that come with these cameras. Though maybe not all of them.
The spherical nature of the camera still gives videos a heavily warped perspective when in one of the wider FOV modes (Insta360 calls them Mega and Ultra). When I exported videos in Dewarp mode, it’s still a fairly wide field of view and warping is minimal, but there’s definitely still clues you’re punching out from a global view. Linear mode does the best job at hiding this, and most of the time I found myself working with this setting. A perk of 360 cameras, of course, is that you can choose most of this after recording.
Out of curiosity, I also tested the X6 against the GoPro Mission 1 Pro and the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P. Despite the GoPro’s action-cam heritage, the image quality is far richer and cinematic than the X6. The difference is even more prominent with the Pocket 4P. That’s to be expected, as the Insta360 is in a totally different category. But if you were hoping the X6 would have action cam ruggedness and gimbal-like stabilization, that’s mostly true, but with some sacrifices. It also brings action cam-level quality and some gimbal fragility — if you drop the X6, the chance of it landing on a lens is double.
The good news is that with Dolby Vision and 10-bit i-Log, you can squeeze out more image quality than what’s offered in standard mode. I got much better results with a little bit of light color grading in software, and no doubt LUTs will be available soon if getting your hands dirty in Davinci Resolve or Premiere isn’t part of your workflow.
Sadly, I still found stitch-lines to be a bit of a burden. The X6 does a good job hiding them for the most part, but they still rear their ugly head when you’re forced to shoot with the subject right where the lenses overlap.
Audio on 360 cameras is a tough topic as often you’re working with a very long selfie-stick. For what it’s worth, the X6’s internal microphones do a decent job of picking up ambient sound. For recording yourself talking to the camera, I’d strongly suggest getting a separate wireless microphone.
