Insta360, the company that makes the Insta360 ONE 360-degree camera attachment sold at Apple retail stores, is today debuting its next-generation product, the upgraded and refined Insta360 ONE X.
Compared to the previous-generation Insta360 ONE, the new Insta360 ONE X has a redesigned body, an upgraded camera that can record in 360 degrees at up to 5.7K resolution with impressive stabilization, and new photo and video capabilities.
I was able to spend some time with the Insta360 ONE X ahead of its launch, and found it to be great little action camera capable of some fun photo and video effects perfect for sharing on social media.
Design
The Insta360 ONE X is rectangular in shape and about the size of a candy bar, making it portable and easy to carry in a bag or in a pocket. It measures in at 4.5 inches by 1.8 inches, and a little under a half an inch thick.
There are cameras on both the front and the back of the Insta360 ONE X, allowing it to capture 360 degree photos and videos all the time. As with the previous version, you can't capture non 360-degree photos, but standard photos and videos are available through post processing and cropping within the Insta360 app.
At the side of the Insta360 ONE X, there's a battery compartment that houses a removable 1200 mAh battery, which lets you swap in another battery for longer on-the-go battery life.
At the bottom, there's a microSD card slot (with a microSD card required for recording photos and videos), and at the other side, there's a microUSB port used for charging purposes.
Below the camera on the front, there's a small display and a set of buttons that let you access settings and swap between photo and video modes.
Pressing on the small button lets you choose to snap photos or record videos, while pressing on the main button takes a photo or starts/stops a video recording. It's an intuitive system that's also supplemented by further controls within the app.
Camera Specs and Image Quality
The Insta360 ONE X has an impressive 18-megapixel f/2.0 aperture camera built in and the image quality for both photos and videos was excellent during my testing, even in conditions where the lighting was not optimal.
My photos and videos turned out crisp, bright, and detailed, and the stabilization produced smooth videos even in situations where I was moving the camera around quite a lot. I didn't use the original Insta360 ONE, so I'm not sure how the image stabilization or photo quality compares, but the ONE X is great.
The ONE X is a 360 degree camera, so it captures you and everything around you in specialized 360 degree photos and videos that you can swipe through to see the entire scene around you. It goes way beyond the wide-angle view of some other action-oriented cameras, offering up a look at a complete moment in time.
I had a lot of fun testing the ONE X in a few parks around the Bay Area, and while I don't do any action sports, it seems like it would be a useful way to capture skiing, surfing (with an included waterproof accessory), biking, and other such activities in fun-to-watch videos.
The camera in the Insta360 ONE X can record 5K video at 30fps, 4K at 30 or 50 fps, and 3k at 100fps. 5K video and the 50 fps 4K video mode are both upgrades over the previous-generation camera.
It can capture RAW images if set to do so, and there's also HDR support for photos, with HDR 360 video in the works.
According to Insta360, the ONE X features gimbal-level stabilization using a "FlowState" stabilization algorithm, and all of the video I took, even spinning the camera around, had little jitter.
Insta360 says the stabilization works well with the Insta360 ONE X mounted to a selfie stick, attached to a helmet, mounted to handle bars, and more, with the algorithm smoothing the video out no matter how the camera is positioned.
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