Hey guys. You know what smartphones are getting so smart these days. I predict
within about five years from now that we will have 360 cameras built-in to our
smartphones and this camera that I've got here the Insta360 Nano is the first
step towards making that happen. So you may have heard of the Insta360 4k
which is an already existing 4k 360 camera. This is the smaller cheaper
version of their 360 technology, so this simply plugs into your iPhone, it's iPhone
only at the moment there is an android version coming up very soon. So
essentially how it works is it plugs directly into the bottom of your
smartphone obviously because there's no jack at the top. It's compatible with iPhone 6
and 6 plus and this goes into the lightning port there and the camera
actually has a lightning port of its own. So it just simply plugs in like that and
then you turn your phone upside down and then you walk around and take photos
and videos like this. So the Insta360 nano is the cheapest 360 camera option
at the moment. It's significantly cheaper than the next cheapest so it's really
good for entry-level photographers who don't want to invest too much but want
to experiment with 360 and get a feel for whether they like it or not. I mean
obviously the quality is going to be a bit lower than some of the more
expensive cameras but you essentially get what you pay for
it's a very usable camera and a very worthwhile investment so let's have a
look at what it can do.
The first thing to note is because the camera plugs into your iPhone here most
of your photos will have to be taken with the camera in your hand, it's hard to
mount it to a tripod just because you can't really get a tripod plate attached
to your iPhone there are tripod adapters but you have to look around and
probably build something yourself there's nothing yet that allows you to
do that.
I mean look for basic 360 photography this isn't a huge issue at all because
you're probably just walking around taking snaps on your phone anyway so it
makes things very easy. So you can actually use this camera without
attaching to a smartphone see it's got the button there where you can record
photo and video however your thumb has to go a little bit too close to the lens
and it ends up looking a bit too distorted,
when you’ve got a smartphone attached your thumb is more down here so it's less
prominent in your final images. So the first thing that impressed me about this
camera is that when I attach the camera to my phone and I've already got the app
downloaded it triggers the app to open automatically which it can be really
handy when you're on the go and you don't have a lot of time to fiddle around
with aps fiddle around with Wi-Fi and it's very fast and see instantly i have a
preview a 360 preview seconds after plugging it in. One thing that I really
like about this is the fact that the camera is attached to the iPhone means
you have a really big screen in front of you to preview your images as you shoot,
some other cameras do have remote shooting
however the quality just isn't as good, preview quality isn't as good as what
I'm seeing here, because the camera’s attached directly to the phone, it's able
to process a high-resolution preview for you to look at. So within the app it's just
as simple as pressing the button here to take a photo and then we can switch to
video mode we hold it down and it records I think about up to 10 seconds
if you swipe up you can release it and then it'll go on for as long as you like
I think the max is about 15 minutes
I wouldn't want to go much longer than that because I think the camera has been
known to overheat
so I wouldn't push it really further than about two or three minutes myself.
Alright so now let's have a quick look at the interface of the app so if we
just click our preview window down the bottom left it takes us to our gallery
and there's the photo I just took and I can look around it
just by moving my thumb like that, that was easy you can change perspectives
fisheye little planet and you can do some basic editing I it's hard to zoom
in and out and it doesn't give you as much control as an app like roll world
or theta plus but it's a good basic little preview editor. Just a couple of things
you can do here snapshot retouch drag but I think I'd rather do that in another
app so what we do is we have already downloaded from the camera so what we'll
do is we'll hit that button up there and we'll go click panorama which saves
the image to our camera roll. Something worth noting is that if you go into
settings
and you hit ‘watermark’ there you’ll probably notice that by default the app adds in
that black spot there just over where your hand is to cover up I guess the
skewed hand because it's hard for the the camera to be able to record your
hand correctly when it's so close to the camera so it automatically puts that
black spot to cover it up.
I get rid of it just so it draws less attention to it,
some people have complained about watermarks not being able to get rid of
them it's as simple as doing this, I just got to watermark remove it. Once you
download your photos to your camera roll you can then import them to editing apps
like roll world or theta plus and turn them into tiny planets. One thing I do
find a little bit annoying is that with video you're not able to do that with
the same apps because they're just not able to process the video I'm not sure why
I've found that they've crashed every time I've imported Insta360 nano
footage so you may have to import your video footage to your computer and use
Insta360 studio if you want to create a tiny planet video from your Insta360
nano footage.
Ok so here's a little something I prepared earlier I shot this in Pitt
Street mall of Sydney, Australia. Look at my Insta360 nano in my hands and so what I've
done here is I've downloaded the free Insta360 studio app and I've imported
the footage in to my computer and then into the program. So what I'm going to do now is
go recorder and I put a keyframe go tiny planet so let's have a look it's very
fast and easy to edit tiny planet in Insta360 studio you can move it around
intuitively with your mouse, I just go for something basic like that I think
and there I go that's looking good
very quickly and easily and the quality is looking very decent. So now let's take a
look at the difference between exporting a little planet from the app and
exorting from Insta360 studio, I think you'll notice here that it's pretty huge
the app version is looking quite pixelated even though it was convenient
being able to edit a little planet straight there in the app, I found it
totally worth the extra ten minutes it took to import to my computer and export
full-resolution use the full data within the image to produce a much sharper
overall tiny planet,
Finally something I really like about this camera is the interchangeable
memory as you can see there's a microSD slot
some of the other cameras don't have that they have built-in memory and this
is really handy and it's got the charging port there. Charges really
quickly and normally it will last you a couple of hours if you go out shooting
think it's a 800mAh battery
I haven't run out yet but I charge them pretty frequently.
Finally it's worth noting the cool box that it came in it's a VR viewer so you can
open it up and slot your phone into there and then you can view it
in virtual reality, it is pretty cool. Overall I think this is a fantastic
camera for its price and it's the first step towards making 360 photo and video
mainstream by incorporating it into our smartphones. So guys I hope you enjoyed
this review feel free to subscribe to us on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
and all the others. I've got a book out it's called Life in 360 A beginner's guide to tiny
planet photography. Feel free to check it out till next time, see ya!