The exterior of the unit is fairly sparse. Putting it on the scales, with a battery and memory card, the Insta360 ONE X only weighs 114g, compared to 187g for the YI 360 VR. But that weight is a bit of an illusion specifically due to that compact size. You can tell when you hold it that they’ve packed a lot of tech into that small case. The Insta360 ONE X feels solid and quite weighty, almost as heavy as the YI 360 VR. It fits more easily in your pocket, and the pouch is a very nice touch for those times when you need quick and easy access to the camera for regular shooting throughout the day.
Sizewise, it’s significantly slimmer than the YI 360 VR I have been using for the last year and a bit, which was nice. The camera comes in a rather nice little neoprene pouch with a lanyard to hang it from your neck. Mostly as a result of the Insta360 Studio for ONE X that we’ll get back to a little later.
The array of action camera mounts might seem a little odd at first, but Insta360 isn’t marketing the ONE X like we might expect a 360° camera to be marketed. What was included, though, is a 1/4-20″ bolt on a piece of (very strong) string, so you can still swing it around your head if you’re feeling brave. Unfortunately, despite having the Invisible Selfie Stick inside the box, the “Bullet Time Handle” wasn’t included in the Winter Box. I felt that this probably should’ve been included in a kit designed for more extreme winter activities. This package contains the Insta360 ONE X camera itself along with a spare battery, a 32GB SanDisk Extreme microSD card, Insta360’s “Invisible Selfie Stick” and several bags of GoPro action camera style mounts. I received the Insta360 ONE X “Winter Box”. Now, we have the Insta360 ONE X, and to be blunt, it blows away every other compact 360° camera I’ve ever tried. Since then, I’ve gone through 3D printed rigs which hold half a dozen action cameras, tried a few of those early pocket-sized 360° cameras, and finally, l started to see some real potential when I got to play with the YI 360 VR towards the end of 2017 – which was very good compared to what was available at the time, given its 5.7K resolution.īut now, the YI 360 VR isn’t the only 5.7K pocket 360° camera in town. These then all had to be tonemapped and stitched together in post to create the final result. It involved a lot of bracketing, carefully moving the camera between shots, resulting in possibly a couple of hundred photographs. This was one of the reasons I got into photography at all. To create realistic lighting in those scenes, the best solution was 360° 2:1 ratio HDRI environment maps of real-world locations. Before I started taking more photography more seriously all by itself, I used to do a lot of 3D modelling. I’ve been working with 360° photographs for years.