Hey guys this is Ben, and in this video I'm going to show you why the Xiaomi
Mijia Mi Sphere is the BEST 360 camera available under $500 right now
A lot of you are following me on Instagram and you'll notice that
basically everything I've done in the last month has been shot with the Xiaomi
camera and I know what you're thinking: Xiaomi? What on earth is that? I can't
even pronounce that let alone understand what it is well look it is an unknown
relatively unknown brand out of China but they've created something that is a
monster that nobody knows about other than the people that myself and Michael
from 360 Rumors have told about. This is the best camera this is better than the
Gear 360, the Theta S and a lot of the other options right now I know that's
shocking to hear because I do talk about the other 360 cameras with a lot of
enthusiasm but this is an area that is growing so quickly that technology is
updating and updating every single week there's something better coming out and
this one changes the game because of many many different features firstly the
design is really good it's nice and flat I really like it so it's a square as
opposed to the kind of round ball or kind of long thin camera that a lot of
the other designs alike and I like it it's been a really good camera to take
around it does fit in my pocket and that's one of the number one things I
look for in a 360 camera it's got to be pocketable which means it's portable
which means you can take it out and get shots everywhere you go instead of
having to carry around a designated bag and it's just easy to shoot with. Just
like the first Gear 360 it has a little tripod which can be taken off very cool
and very thin it has a 1/4 inch tripod thread underneath which means you can
put it on other tripods selfie sticks and whatnot so this is a really nice
little camera my only kind of issue with the design is it's hard to put down and
because it is so thin you've got you do need to kind of balance it and I do
worry about it falling over if I have to put it like that so I do keep it on the
tripod most of the time another small issue I
have is because it does have legs like this they often are in your shots
this is unavoidable unfortunately unless you put it on a selfie stick or just put
it on the ground but look I edit mine out in Snapseed or another program
Photoshop it's quite easy to remove the tripod but it's always going to be
there. Just something to keep in mind but overall I would say this is one of
the better designed cameras it's nice and thin it feels really good it's very
solid and they've used the space around the outside really smartly it's very
simple to pick up there aren't too many menus or confusing buttons there's just
three on the top, there's ON, Wi-Fi and record, the ON also doubles as photo
video switch between the two and then it's just got your ports on the side you
have a micro USB and then there's a microSD slot in there as well most of
your settings you can change through the smartphone app the smartphone app still
is in the beginning stages because this is a brand new camera essentially
whenever a company comes out with a new camera their app is going to be in the
beginner stages so you will notice that with both the Android and iPhone version
I'll put them both in the link down below but don't expect anything too
fancy ok let's open up the app so firstly you'll just want to pair the
camera with your phone takes a few seconds and here we go have a preview
already that we can look around and change between photo and video modes
down the bottom right bottom left is a link to our gallery top right we have
settings so we can change the resolution of photos and videos as you can see the
max there is 3456 by 1728, 30 frames a second and has a few lower ones does 60
frames a second at 2304 by 1152 okay white balance exposure compensation
there's two different photo resolutions obviously you're going to want the very
highest, so keep it on that. ISO exposure time this is a really cool feature
it goes up to 32 seconds so ot means you'll be able to see in the dark at nighttime
we can do light paintings and you can go to a really dark area and it'll
see it like daytime if you set it to one of these longer shutter speeds you can
set it timer so it can be two seconds up to ten seconds which is handy if you can
put the camera down and walk away when you select video mode you'll notice
on the right-hand side if you press that little icon we have an option to do a
time-lapse video you can essentially record for as long as you want and
choose the intervals of when it takes the photos it should automatically
stitch them together for you which is really handy and you can view the
time-lapse as your recording and here we have our gallery where it stitches the
photos and videos wirelessly from the camera and you can view it there in the
viewer and don't I look happy there!
really the app does the job it's easy to connect so that's all you can ask from
it. In my experience of battery life has been good I would say just as good as
all the other 360 cameras if you're recording in 3.5 K which is the max
video resolution it'll last a good hour hour and a half so that's pretty good
there aren't interchangeable batteries so you will need to charge it bring around
power banks if you want to do that but no interchangeable batteries you can
add memory I think it's up to 256 gigabytes in a microSD slot both of
those things are totally sufficient for me some people might prefer more battery
and more memory you can actually plug it into the power while you're recording
which is awesome however something I found was when I tested it out it
it recorded for a long time I'm talking two to three hours and I found that the
camera drained slightly more battery than it filled up which meant after
about three hours it ran out of battery from a full charge
let's test to see how long this camera can record for without overheating or
stopping i've got a good feeling about this that if i plug it in power it's going to
go for a while so the time now is just after midday in Sydney so I'm going to
put a brand new 128 gigabyte Samsung card with 100 megabits a second write
speed so this should hopefully go for a while hypothetically it could go for
several hours so i'm gonna whack that bad boy in there and I will put a link in the
description to where you can find this, this is my recommended card of choice
because it handles 4k footage really really well
ok we're plugged in camera goes on video mode and record let's see how long it's
going to take for this camera to overheat the clock reads 2:30 and still
going let's see there's warm not really well a little bit of warmth but i don't
feel like it's gonna overheat I do have a fast card and that is crucial to getting
long recordings but that is two and a half hours and this is still going that is
very impressive ok we're at 3 hours 20 minutes and it
turned off so now I'm going to investigate whether the card filled up
or whether it did in fact overheat it looks like there's still sixty three
gigabytes left on the card so there was lots of space left which means it could have
gone for about seven hours or so looking at the files looks like it's broken them
up into lots of different sections so they're roughly ten minutes each
it's broken them up into ten minute sections and stopped around the three hour twenty
mark I mean hot damn I am impressed by that three hours and 20 minutes of 4k sorry
3.5K 360 recording is super impressive a big factor you should consider that a
lot of cameras have issue with is overheating because the design of 360
cameras is so small they are very likely to overheat given most of them are
recording 4k and that's a lot to demand of something the size of a pack of cards
and while I haven't actually noticed this with the recording of 3.5 K video I
have noticed this with the transferring of files whenever I've
uploaded footage and photos from this to my iPhone this got so hot literally that
it almost burned me like I touched it and I couldn't hold my finger there for
more than about three or four seconds without being really
really painful and that surprised me like I honestly thought it would start melting so
it turns out the camera was okay in the end but it does get really hot during
transfers just something to keep in mind if in hot climates it's going to heat up
it may very well overheat as I said I haven't experienced that during
recording but during transferring you just want to
be careful do one clip at a time and don't overload it so like I said the
video resolution is 3.5 K which is actually really close to 4k and from
what I've seen so far it looks absolutely excellent this is one of the
best performing 360 video cameras I've worked with so far I've been shooting
all of my VLOG in 360 episodes with this and I'm not even tempted to use
another camera because it just performed so well for video the resolution looks
nice and the most beautiful thing about this camera in my opinion is the six
axis stabilization it looks absolutely stunning you can walk down the street
you can bump the crap out of the camera yet it'll be completely stable and look
like you've got a Steadicam under it it looks absolutely insane it's amazing
what they're doing 360 cameras the fact that they can add amazing features like
that just with a firmware update we have seen this with the insta 360 Nano and
air and pro but to be able to do that to a firmware update is just really a
testament to how fast this technology is moving and the fact that you don't
actually have to buy another camera but just wait for the developers to release
new features which you can download and then update to your camera this is the
best feature of this camera in my opinion it's a perfect moving camera
this is great to have in your hand because it's always going to be steady
when you're on the go something else I love is the dynamic range this camera in
my experience it's been excellent it captures highlights and shadows really
well within the same image for video it looks exceptional look it does sometimes
have issues in high contrast situations where it's brighter on one side than the
other and there are big lens flares not lens flares but disparity between the
two lenses where you can see kind of like a border in between the two
hemispheres when they're stitched together all cameras are like this
unfortunately the only solution more or less is add more lenses
more than two however for a cheap camera like this this performs
excellently if you saw my comparison between this and the gear 360 2017
you'll see that it outperforms the gear 360 in basically every single way the
stitching was better it was better handheld it was better in low light and
the overall look was just better and that's not to take away from the gear
360 because it is a still a very good camera but like I said technology is
just evolving so quickly especially in that 360 field it seems like almost on a
monthly basis now the totem-pole changes and there's a new best camera and at the
moment this has taken over from the gear 360 2017 and that shouldn't take away
from the gear 360 camera because it is good in many ways and does have a few
features that this one doesn't have like live streaming and the apps are better
desktop software this one doesn't yet have desktop software however they are
making it so I think it'll be ready within the next one to two months
hopefully by maybe August the end of August 2017 so now you'll just have to
stitch on your phone for Android it will stitch in full resolution unfortunately
with iPhone it reduces the resolution a bit unfortunately that's just the way it
is for now you can stitch it on desktop and I've already made a tutorial that
will show you how to do it in adobe premiere completely for free so
definitely check that out another option for stitching at full
resolution is to consider picking up a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 phone this is only
$165 yet it's going to allow you to import and stitch at full resolution for
both photos and videos this is a good answer for iPhone users if you have an
extra 150 160 dollars to spare and also Android users if you want a second phone
that you can dedicate to just shooting I find this handy because it means my main
phone isn't having the battery drained constantly while I'm shooting so I'll
put a link to this one down in description in terms of photo resolution
it's also extremely impressive the images it takes a 6912 by 3456 and
looking at it on my 5k iMac it looks excellent
I can't see any pixels anywhere really - really sharp around the middle the
dynamic range is really nice and it's just a really professional-looking image
that captures the moment with such clarity with that said it isn't a camera
without its flaws they don't actually have a massive team working on this
camera so they weren't able to anticipate for some things like
occasionally there's been a bit of a lens disparity where the color
temperature has been different from one lens to the other I found I have been
able to fix this in Snapseed which is where I grade my tiny planets but it is
annoying they are working all the time to update their firmware and the apps to
avoid these problems and I've found from interacting on the Xiaomi Facebook group
they are highly responsive and they want to know all the problems with the camera
so they can fix them I found there's been a few odd quirks that have been
inconsistent I can't tell you exactly when they will show up I know they will
be fixed and I know from stitching manually I'd be able to fix all of them
but I'll just let you know some of them one of them is heat lines I found
sometimes heat lines show up around the seam line only when I stitch on mobile I
think they are probably going to fix it but they are annoying stitching on
mobile also sometimes the horizon is a bit out of whack if you start if you
turn the camera and press record while the cameras like this and then you go
like this it'll kick it'll stabilize the horizon line to be like that so it's
going to be a little bit out of whack so whenever you are recording turn the
camera on make sure it's level and her right the horizon line is level and then
press record at one time in my life my heart was dedicated to the Ricoh theta
camera I took it everywhere I went took it out for romantic evenings went on
long walks for the beach with it it was everything I wanted from a camera and
needed but now that part of my heart has been replaced by a camera whose name I
can't even pronounce yes I would say the Xiaomi Mijia Mi Sphere is better than the
Ricoh Theta S in pretty much every single way. It matches it
in many ways in the excellent dynamic range image quality also long exposure
however the big game-changer is the video this is just the best of the two
by far because of the 3.5 K video the stabilization it's just amazing for
video so while they are equal cameras on most fronts I would say this one is
better for video by far which makes it the better camera this is the camera I'm
recommending to everyone I get asked every single day several times a day
which camera should I buy and I used to say say Theta S no question now I'm saying
buy this one because firstly it's cheap and secondly it does the most variety of
things that a photographer or video shooter could want in the most amount of
situations this has your back in most situations I haven't really had it let
me down yet whereas I have had a lot of other cameras let me down in some
department whether it's video or photo and this has been a good all-around
camera that I really will have been using a lot and will be using a lot in
the future until the next big thing comes out like I say this technology is
moving so fast that almost every single month there's a new king of the 360
camera at the moment it's this one that's probably going to change the
Theta 4k might knock it off its perch but for now this is the best
option. Where can you get it I hear you asking? It's not actually on Amazon or
Ebay the place to find it is gearbest.com I'll put a link down in the
description to where you can find it and it's quite cheap I think at the moment
it's around 300 US dollars and that does go up and down a bit really it's it goes
from anywhere from 250 to about 350 depending on the day they do have
specials on all the time so you will want to check it at the time of
watching this video but that is affordable I think most people can
afford roughly 2 or $300 and for the amount of value it delivers this is both
a photo and a video camera this is going to be an excellent excellent investment
and potentially delivers the most amount of value out of any of the 360 cameras
available right now if you want to see more cool shit that I've done with this
definitely follow me on Instagram I'm @benclaremont also subscribe to
us on YouTube we're on Facebook as well I'm posting all the time every single
day footage with this, photos with this as well as all the other 360 cameras I
review them I compare them and tiny planets tutorials all that kind of
stuff is covered at Life in 360 so definitely stay tuned for more awesome
shit! Cool guys I hope this was helpful if anything is still unclear let me know
put a comment down in the box below and I'll do my best to answer it I've been
using this camera for about a month now so I've got a pretty good understanding
of it if you do decide to buy this camera or if you've already bought it there's a
Facebook group I'd recommend you join I'll put a link down in the description
but it's essentially filled with all the other users of this camera who can help
you if you have any questions as well as me I'll do my best but those guys are
really smart and they're posting all the cool stuff of they're shooting with it so
I think you'll find that group really interesting. Until next time keep
capturing your world in 360 this is your boy Ben Claremont and I'll see you in the
next video!