- Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video.
360 cameras have come an incredibly long way
in such a short period of time, you can now get
an awesome 360 or VR camera for under $200.
In this video we're gonna take a look at
the Insta360 Nano and the Samsung Gear 360,
and I'm gonna share my thoughts on each.
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All right, so with the two cameras
that we're gonna look at, the Insta360 Nano
and the Samsung Gear 360, there are quite
a lot of similarities between the two.
The first is that they both sell for under $200 US.
They also both have around a two-hour battery life.
They're both designed to work specifically
with either an iPhone, for the Insta360 Nano,
or one of the latest Samsung devices
for the Samsung Gear 360.
Now while they're designed to work with those smartphones,
you can actually use both of these 360 cameras standalone,
so without the need for the phone,
but you won't get all the features,
nor the full control that you would get
if you are using them with the recommended device.
When they are paired up with the recommended smartphone,
they're both really easy to use.
It's so easy to jump on, take a photo
or take a 360 video, and share it to places
like Facebook and to YouTube within a few button presses.
So they're both really easy to use once you've got
the apps up and running, and both of these 360 cameras
have a Micro SD card slot so that your footage
is recorded to a Micro SD card.
So those are the key elements that both
the cameras have in common.
I've actually done a video on each of the cameras,
both filmed in 360 on YouTube,
and I'll link them both in the cards and in the description
so that you can check out a full 360 video
created with each of the cameras.
So in this video I'm gonna share with you my thoughts,
or my top five things that you need to know
about both the Insta360 Nano and the Samsung Gear 360.
I'm gonna start off with the Samsung Gear 360.
So the first thing that you need to know is
that both of these cameras run hot,
they do heat up after a short period of use.
The Samsung Gear 360 though, heats up quite
a lot more to the point where
it actually switches off and stops working.
When I was actually recording the 360 Samsung video
the camera switched off two or three times
just through recording that one video,
so it's definitely not ideal if you're gonna be filming out
in warm temperature days, or out in direct sunlight,
and the other thing I also found with the Samsung Gear 360
is that it fogged up on more than one occasion.
So it was when I was filming with the camera
and had one lens facing me, and the other was facing,
think it was pretty much direct sunlight, which isn't ideal,
but it's a 360 camera, so you gotta expect these things.
But the second camera, the camera that's facing
the sun fogged up, and I had no way of knowing until
when I got back to edit the footage,
that the footage was really unusable,
'cause one of the camera lenses had fogged up.
So definitely not ideal, and it's definitely
something I think that anyone should be aware of
if they're looking to purchase that camera.
Number two, I really like that you can connect
and control everything with the camera
through your smartphone, wirelessly.
It connects through Bluetooth, so it means you can get
some distance away from the 360 camera
so that you're not always in shot,
and that you don't always have to physically touch
the camera to start and stop the recording.
Also means that you can monitor it from
a distance, which is really awesome.
The Insta360 Nano doesn't let you do
that because it's physically clipped to
the bottom of your iPhone, so that's a really great feature
and it's something I found really handy
when moving out of your 360 shots,
to start and stop, and still monitor what was going on.
Number three, the stitching on the Samsung Gear 360 is good,
but it's definitely not the best.
If you've got a lot of light on one camera and not on
the other one, then the stitching line between the two,
there's not a lot of blur between them, or a lot
of fading between the two to really merge them well.
The Insta360 Nano does a much better job
at stitching the two camera lenses together
than the Samsung Gear 360, so if there's a big difference
in brightness between one camera and the other one,
then the transition line, or the join line between
the two can be pretty prominent,
and really obvious on the Samsung Gear 360.
Number four, now I've already mentioned
that you need to have one of the latest Samsung phones
or Samsung devices to be able
to use this device at its maximum.
So to get remote control of everything,
and to really get access to all the features,
but probably the biggest thing that you'll find
that the device does is the stitching.
The camera doesn't do any stitching internally,
which means that you've gotta do it on either
your latest Samsung device, or a Windows computer.
There's currently no software on Mac that's provided
by Samsung anyway, that will allow you to do the stitching,
or join the two cameras into one file.
So I think that's really important to know
that you need to have one of the latest Samsung devices
to be able to create a video that you can use somewhere,
or you need to be on Windows and do
the stitching on the computer.
And number five, in my opinion,
the Samsung Gear 360 has the best picture quality
of any 360 camera around the $200 price point.
It's a 4K camera, the video looks really crisp
and really sharp, and the stills look awesome
as well, so do the time lapses,
and when you compare the Samsung Gear 360 side-by-side to
the Insta360 Nano, which is a 3K camera,
you can definitely notice the picture quality
is much sharper and clearer on the Samsung.
All right, so now on to my five thoughts,
or five things you need to know about the Insta360 Nano.
Number one is that this camera has in-built stitching.
So what this means is you're not relying on
the stitching happening afterwards,
on either your phone or your computer,
like you are with the Samsung Gear 360,
it's actually done in the camera itself which means
that you can do things like go live in 360
to places like Facebook or YouTube Live live,
directly from the camera, so that's pretty awesome.
Number two, one thing that you really need
to be aware of when you're using the Insta360 Nano is
that there's no easy way to place it down somewhere.
It doesn't have a flat bottom,
it doesn't have any way of placing it down
where it's not gonna be resting on one of the two lenses.
It does come with a soft pouch, so you really need
to make sure that you're carrying that pouch
with you everywhere, because if you take it off your phone,
and you wanna place it down, there's no way
to place it down without it sitting on one of
the two lenses, which then it's highly likely
that the lenses can get scratched or destroyed.
Number three, the way that the Insta360 camera connects
to your phone is through the Lightning port.
The Lightning port's on the bottom of the phone,
which means that the camera's gotta be plugged in to
the bottom, which means that to use your phone
and the camera, you've gotta use your phone upside-down.
So while that takes a little bit of getting used to,
and usability and everything is fine,
you need to be aware that if you're going
to mount your phone on a tripod,
which is highly likely for any 360 video,
a lot of the standard phone mounts don't hold
the phone properly, if it's in upside-down,
so it's definitely something that makes
the whole process of mounting it to a tripod,
and in a phone holder, slightly more difficult.
Number four is that the Insta360 Nano doesn't record videos
in standard video file formats,
it actually records in its own file format,
which means if you take the Micro SD card out
and plug it into your computer,
you'll have to use the Insta360 software,
which is a free download, to convert
the video files into a standard QuickTime file,
or movie file that you can then edit
in your video editing software.
So even when we were creating our Insta360 video,
we took the Micro SD card out of the camera,
plugged it into the computer, we had to convert
all of our video files across using the Insta360 software
to convert about 25 minutes of video footage,
360 video footage, into normal video to be edited.
It took around an hour and a half
to convert that amount of footage,
so it does take awhile to convert the footage,
especially if you've got a lot of it.
And number five, the Insta360 Nano
is insanely quick to get up and running.
You literally just plug it into your phone,
it automatically opens the app,
and then you can quickly choose
if you want to do video, or photo.
So it's much quicker, and much more seamless process
to turn on without having to wait for Bluetooth,
and all the other things that you've gotta do
with the Samsung Gear 360.
The Insta360 Nano is a much faster camera
to quickly turn on and get recording, or take photos.
So those are my five thoughts,
or five things you need to know about
the Insta360 Nano and the Samsung Gear 360.
Now really, if I had to pick one to go out
and do some 360 shooting now, I'd probably be torn between
the two, because I really like the picture quality on
the Samsung, but I really like the ease-of-use,
and having the ability to go live with the Insta360 Nano.
So they are actually two different product offerings,
and obviously if you've got an iPhone,
makes the choice a bit easier to go
the Insta360 Nano versus the Samsung 360 camera
that has to be used with a Samsung device.
If you found this video helpful,
make sure you click that big Subscribe button
if you haven't already, and give this video a thumbs-up,
and linked on screen now are our 360 videos
for both the Samsung Gear 360 and the Insta360 Nano.
I'll see you next time.