I attend a lot of tech conferences, including high profile events such as Apple’s annual iPhone launch or the Mobile World Congress in Spain. At those events, the camera I see most are iPhone cameras. In second place is probably a tie between a Sony mirrorless or an Insta360 X3.
The X3, and the cameras in the series before it, have been highly popular for solo creators who don’t have the extra hand or time to move a camera around, or frame a shot specifically. Instead, with a 360 camera, they can just hit the record button and capture everything in the environment.
The new X4 is going to take that to another level, because it ups the maximum 360 video resolution to 8K, instead of 5.7K from before. The extra pixels mean footage appears sharper, and 8K resolution is close enough to a professional level 360 footage.
But because there are not many platforms to show off 360 videos yet, the use case most people (including myself) do is shoot a 360 video first, and then reframe the video later (put in camera motion to pan around a frame) and then export a “normal” video. The extra resolution comes into play here too. With the X3, the reframed footage maxed out at 2.7K, the new X4 can produce a 4K video. See video below for samples.
Shooting 8K videos take a lot of power (and memory), so the X4 has increased in a size (both in height and thickness) a bit to house a bigger battery and perhaps to give the body more space for heat to dissipate. It’s still a very portable package, weighing 203g and measuring 46×123.6×37.6mm, but it is about 10% bigger than the X3. It won’t matter if you’re storing the camera in a large bag. But if you had previously carried the X3 in a small pouch (in my case, sometimes a fanny pack), maybe the extra bulk makes it slightly more challenging.
The extra size does allow the X4 to sport a larger 2.5-inch screen, and it also gets brighter than before, hence why in the image above, the X4’s screen looks blown out — a very bright screen may be tricky for product photography, but it’s great for real world use.
The reason this camera is so popular with solo creators is that not only can it record footage all around you, which can be reframed later, but Insta360’s software also does a very intelligent job. For example, you can hold the camera out far away with a selfie stick, and the software will erase the selfie stick, so the result appears to be a video or image captured by someone else holding the camera from some distance away, like the image below.
The X4’s larger sensors and better chip basically allows the camera to shoot in higher resolution or faster framerate in every mode, including slow motion, timelapse, etc. It’s an improvement over the X3 in every area, other than overall size.
With the extra power does come a price bump: the X4 starts at $529 for the most basic package for just the camera and some small accessories. If you add some widely used extras like a selfie stick, an extra battery, card reader, etc, the price jumps to well over $640. But considering how much this camera can do, I think plenty of one-man content creators, frequent travelers, vloggers and influencers, would make good use of this versatile device.
