It’s cramped, but not too cramped for me, and besides you can always manage the entire shooting process on your phone using the Samsung Gear 360 app. All this information is displayed on a tiny (but legible, even in daylight) screen below the record button. Just below that is a small power button that doubles as the “back” button for when you’re browsing menus. A small menu button cycles through different shooting modes (photo, video, time-lapse, HDR photo, etc.) and is also used to connect the camera to your phone. There’s a big “record” button that can be used to take photos, as well as start and stop recording videos. The camera still works the same basic way, so it’s easy to operate. The camera captures richer and more accurate colors, too, and overall it looks like Samsung overhauled the tuning of the image processing software. The new Gear 360 captures sharper still images, is better in challenging light (especially when dealing with a bright sun set against a clear blue sky), and does a better job obscuring the seam where the dual-camera images are stitched together. That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress. It’s hard to see how the format gets around this problem - it’s too niche right now to accelerate these parts of the technological curve - but what’s certain is a camera like the Gear 360 isn’t going to be what makes that happen. Most DSLRs and smartphones have more than enough megapixels when you consider that the infrastructure we use to distribute and watch digital video - whether it’s a phone’s screen, or a computer monitor, or cellular data speeds - is largely still catching up to accomodate 4K resolution.ģ60-degree cameras exist in a weird limbo right nowīut with 360-degree video, you need far more than that amount of resolution to make the whole spherical image look detailed enough for our eyes and brains to comfortable with.
It's rather different from where (and when) traditional digital cameras are currently at in terms of development. These are all symptoms of the weird sort of limbo 360-degree currently exits in. (That’s especially important if you’re viewing it in a headset.) The highest resolution the new Gear 360 lets you shoot when capturing 30 frames per second is 2880 x 1440, and to shoot at 60 frames per second you have to settle for 2560 x 1280. I typically prefer the look of 24 fps when it comes to regular videos, but higher frame rates (like 30 or 60) are key with 360-degree videos because the footage looks more fluid. You’re still only able to shoot in 4K with a max frame rate of 24 frames per second.
Other than Samsung stretching the resolution a bit higher, the Gear 360’s video capabilities haven’t advanced much. No surprise, too, since the camera uses two 8.4-megapixel image sensors instead of the dual 15-megapixel sensor setup on the first camera. 4K is a nice benchmark, but the image quality is only marginally better than it was on the original Gear 360. It shoots true 4K resolution now, but remember: that resolution is spread around the entire 360-degree sphere. The new Gear 360 is not a major evolution.
But it makes that search a little less painful. It’s still a solution looking for a problem. The new Gear 360, which costs $229, doesn’t magically answer the question “what good is 360-degree imagery for?” any more than its predecessor, or any other 360-degree camera for that matter. It also now works with iPhones, though the compatibility stops there. It’s a taller, slimmer version of the Gear 360 that’s easier to hold in your hand, captures better quality videos and photos, and fixes most of the many little problems that made its predecessor frustrating to use. That life ended earlier this year when Samsung announced and released the new Gear 360. “The shelf life of this version of the Gear 360 is the same shelf life of other pioneering digital cameras: short.” “It’s a first-generation product that, before we know it, Samsung will replace with a true 4K or even 8K model,” I wrote in my review last fall. It was very obviously the first attempt at making a new kind of camera, one that shoots in 360 degrees. The Samsung Gear 360, which was released last year alongside the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, was a decent camera despite its flaws.