*UFO sounds*
- Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Ugh.
Ah, ah,
Ooh!
Ah.
This is the Ultracker Aleta S2C.
And it's a 66 megapixel 360 camera.
66! Like do you even understand how high that is?
The best DSLR's out there
are around 50 megapixels right now,
and this is 66.
So it must be better right?
Well,
you'll see at the end of the video.
I'm just gonna say it, this thing is massive.
It looks like a spaceship and you can't easily
fit it in the palm of your hand.
But that's okay because for 66 megapixels, I forgive it.
It has one, two, three, four, five lenses.
No that's not a lens on the bottom,
that's a tripod mount.
We have a battery compartment and a micro SD slot.
Two different charging ports, an audio jack, and DC power.
On button, shutter button, display.
This display is super old school,
it looks like you're looking into a DSLR viewfinder
when you look at this thing.
Which is fine, its just a bit weird.
Now, this is what happens when you take a photo.
All right.
You can't actually change
any of these settings physically,
there's no buttons to do that,
you'll need to connect to the app to change
any of your photo settings.
(ufo sounds)
And the batteries, look at those things.
These are just cheap generic batteries,
I found them on eBay already for $12.
Okay, so that's a bit of what it is.
And now, what it isn't.
It isn't a selfie camera...
(playful music)
Its not a decent 360 video camera.
It shoots 4K 360 video at 10 frames a second.
Look at this.
But where this camera really shines is with its sharpness,
with 66 megapixels, which is 11,000 and something
by 5,000 and something,
there's no denying when you zoom in really close
on anything, you can actually see detail there.
Where most 360 cameras used to be soft and grainy,
it's still sharp.
The average photo resolution for a 360 camera
in early 2019, is 20 to 30 megapixels max.
This is more than double the resolution
we're used to with point and shoot cameras.
And I've gotta say the sharpness
is just really nice to look at.
Here I put the Aleta next to the Insta 360 ONE X
and took a photo inside my apartment.
At first you might think huh,
there's not much of a difference here,
but that's only because we're in a wide viewpoint right now.
When we punch in, this is where the higher resolution
is really noticeable.
That massage ball on the couch
is actually pretty sharp on the right,
where it's getting a bit blotchy and soft on the left.
I'm zoomed in quite far here,
but the difference is impressive.
Here's an artwork on the wall a few meters away,
and yeah, my girlfriend's South African,
and for some reason South Africans are obsessed
with having African animals all over their house.
They're just obsessed.
I can't explain it.
Anyway I digress, again it's way sharper
on the right than the left.
This doesn't mean that the ONE X is doing a bad job,
rather it illustrates that in a situation
where you do need that the extra resolution,
like if you're shooting real estate
and you want as much detail as possible.
Investing in a middle of the range camera like the Aleta S2C
is going to give you a level of sharpness
that any other point and shoot 360 camera couldn't give you.
There's ain't no denying it, sharpness and resolution
are the Ultracker S2C's main draw cards.
But, if you're a fan of this channel
and you've been here a while,
you'll know my photographic sensibilities,
and you'll know what I like more than just pure resolution.
And that is dynamic range.
Here's the same photo from before,
but this time I've changed the viewpoint to face outside.
And both the ONE X and the Aleta have in-built HDR,
which I've used here.
I'm sad to say it, but things aren't looking
too bright for the Aleta.
That or they're looking way too bright.
Look at those highlights, they're completely washed out.
There's no detail there beyond my balcony.
Whereas with the ONE X, you can still see
the color of the sky, you can see all the details outside.
I think it's safe to say that the ONE X's
in-built HDR is infinitely better than the Aleta S2C's,
and to be honest I found the Aleta's in-built HDR
to be pretty disappointing.
In the app there are three levels of HDR to choose from,
weakness, medium, and strength.
And here I am on George Street
in the Sydney CBD just before sunset,
and I deliberately chose this high contrasting environment
to test this out.
With weakness and medium,
there's no details at all in the highlights.
With strength, it's actually a lot better,
however, I'm looking kind of tan there.
While I would call this unacceptable,
I think we've established by this point that this is more
of a real estate camera than anything else,
so I don't think it's fair to judge
based on what I look like.
We should judge based on
what the building and the environment look like.
And with in-built HDR on its strongest setting,
when I look around, I'm actually kinda impressed.
These buildings look really good,
the dynamic range looks good,
and I haven't even color-corrected this yet.
So in terms of shooting high contrast outdoor environments,
I give this a thumbs up.
If you're considering this camera
for real estate and virtual tours,
then your priority is going to be shooting interiors
with strong mixed lighting,
Since most locations you shoot
are probably going to have windows.
So this is where it gets interesting because
there is another HDR method you can use
to deal with tricky interior mixed lighting,
and it's called bracketing.
You may be familiar with bracketing from DSLRs,
well it's the exact same principle.
You're capturing three different exposures
and blending them together
in a HDR software like Photomatix Pro.
And I've done that here in one of Sydney's oldest
and most majestic buildings, the Queen Victoria building.
And the results I got after blending the three exposures
in Photomatix Pro was pretty impressive.
The colors and exposure are overall looking pretty nice.
This is far from a perfect image,
but I'm happy with the exposure
across 90% of the photo.
In some areas the highlights are still blown out,
and I'm noticing a little bit of grain too.
No doubt, a pro HDR photographer
would do way better than me, but after this experiment,
I can say that blending multiple exposures
gives you an okay result.
You should still be careful though,
because as we saw before, this camera does struggle
handling the highlights of mixed lighting interiors.
Here I've set up a 12K time lapse with the Aleta S2C
on my balcony here in Sydney, and plugged it in DC power,
which is handy because I want to leave
this rolling for a few hours.
With such high photo resolution, lies massive potential
for awesome, high quality time lapses.
Combine this with the ability to plug the camera into power,
and you can leave this camera rolling forever.
Here I made a 4 1/2 hour time lapse,
which I've now sped up to 15 seconds.
The results overall were pretty good,
but I've gotta say, editing this in Premiere,
it was impossible to reframe.
I couldn't do it.
So I'm just showing you the 12K equi-rectangular
photos since I haven't figured out the proper workflow yet.
Now let's punch in, and while the results are pretty good,
the stitching's moving.
That building, it's coming to life, No!
It's coming to get us, Ahhhhhhhhhhh!
Yeah, that's not good is it?
You don't want your 360 photos moving in your time lapse,
you need everything to be as still as possible.
I really, really hope they see this video and fix this,
but because of this, I would not rely
on this camera for time lapses,
especially if you're going to display as 360,
since your audience will zoom in and see this.
I found the workflow to be really fast
because the camera has in-built stitching,
when I put my SD card into my computer,
you have a fully stitched, full resolution image
waiting for you straightaway.
You don't have to do anything.
Although, yes, you probably will have to do something
given the exposure issues we just talked about.
But the in-built stitching is good, who doesn't want that?
Shooting in tight spaces with this camera is a big no no,
because the lenses are so far away from each other,
they are going to stitch stuff out.
So this is why it's not a selfie camera,
and this is why you shouldn't put it
close to anything really.
I saw on their website, they recommended putting the camera
no closer than 100 centimeters from anything.
Like this far, and if everything's this far away,
it will do a good job at stitching.
But if it's any closer, there will be noticeable errors.
So am I going to be the one to point out
the obvious about who this camera is for?
It's for virtual tour photographers!
Anyone that shoots big open locations
with a lot of space and needs a lot of resolution.
And yeah, you will need a good understanding
of post-production if you're going to merge
all of those HDR images to get that perfect exposure.
But ultimately, I see this as a camera
for the resolution junkies.
People who want more pixels over everything,
and don't mind spending all that extra time
working on the post-production of their images.
Not that it will take that long
once you get the workflow down pat,
but it is going to take some practice to get there.
Is this a DSLR killer?
No.
The quality you can get with a high-end DSLR
and a nodal head will far exceed this.
And I really do say this the mid-point between
point and shoot cameras and high-end DSLRs,
in terms of both workflow and image quality.
Would I do a paid job with this?
Yes, the quality's there and high resolution
justifies clients paying a little bit more money.
I definitely do see this as a money making 360 camera,
but only slightly more so than the other
point and shoot cameras I talk about on my channel.
And it's because of the high resolution and nothing else.
Should you buy this camera?
Yeah, if you have $1,200 for experimental purposes,
and you don't mind buying from a company
that is still quite small,
where the updates are few and far between.
I've noticed the price of the Aleta S2C
go up and down a lot.
At the cheapest, it's been just under $1,000,
at the most expensive it's around $1,200.
Also if I can get my hands on any coupon codes,
I'll leave them down there in the description.
Be sure to check out Ultracker's website
for more information about the S2C.
Oh yeah, I used to have a website like this in the 90's.
So that's it.
I've got a flight to catch,
so hit that subscribe button if you haven't already,
and press the like button if you liked this video.
You shall not pass!
Couldn't help myself.
Bye.
*UFO sounds*