Shooting VR videos and 360 ° panoramic photos is the purpose of Samsung's new Gear 360. At present, people are relatively indifferent to ordinary camera products. Maybe this new product can make users refreshing.
At present, Samsung Gear 360 has no competitors. LG 360 ($268 * about 1776 yuan) and Ricoh Theta S ($418 * about 2770 yuan) are among the few direct competitors. Gear 360 is priced at $390 (about 2585 yuan), which is not the most expensive in this product category.
This camera has two 180 ° fisheye lenses. Each lens can take 180 ° photos or combine them into 360 ° photos. Of course, it can also record videos. The camera's storage space can be expanded and the battery is designed to be removable. However, Samsung does not sell the battery of Gear 360 alone.
Parameter list
Memory: 1GB
Screen: 0.5 inch PMOLED
Connectivity: 1 x USB2.0, supporting up to 200GB mircoSD card expansion, NFC, gyroscope and accelerator, WiFi direct connection
Network: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1
Body size: 60 x 66.7 x 56.2mm
Camera: 2 x 15 megapixel lens
Weight: 145g
appearance
The size of the Gear 360 body is between a golf ball and a table tennis ball. Although the body is made of composite materials, it still feels very solid and weighs 145g. In addition, the body has IP53 certification, which can prevent water and dust, but it can only withstand rain drops. It cannot be thrown into the water. The two fisheye lenses are wrapped by a piece of glass. Unfortunately, the glass will be scratched easily. We hope that the materials of such a cheap machine can be better lost. There is a groove at the bottom of the camera, which is compatible with most tripods on the market.
(NFC location and cover opening position)
When you open the cover on the front of the body, you can see that there are batteries, Micro USB interfaces and microSD cards. The connection of various materials on the body is very smooth. It can be seen that the manufacturing process of the Gear 360 is good. The attached tripod can provide a stable standing posture of the camera. When the tripod is closed, you can hold the tripod in your hand to shoot.
Samsung Gear 360 uses a DRIMe5s chip with 1GB of memory. The camera can be connected to the mobile phone through Bluetooth, and its own NFC chip makes it more convenient to connect with the mobile phone. In addition, it supports direct WiFi connection, making data transmission faster and faster.
Software
Users can use the Android app "Samsung Gear 360 Manager" on their mobile phones to control their cameras. This app can be found and downloaded in Google's Play Store, but currently only supports Samsung's own mobile phones (S6 S6 Edge 、 S6 Edge+ 、S7、 S7 Edge Etc.). Although you can find the APK file of this software on Samsung's official website, other phones cannot be opened after installation. I wonder why Samsung did this. Don't you want users of other mobile brands to buy Gear 360?
With this app, you can make settings changes to the Gear 360 on your phone, and firmware upgrades can also be made through the app. After connecting to the phone, Gear 360 can also use the phone's GPS to mark the geographical position when shooting videos. In the App, you can also view the camera's storage space usage, battery capacity and other information. In addition, WiFi direct connection is particularly useful, but in our tests, sometimes WiFi direct connection will not work, As a result, we can only use Bluetooth connection to transmit data, which is really slow to death!
(Camera control software interface)
At the same time, it also supports the real-time viewfinder mode, which takes about five seconds to connect. Then you can see the real-time picture of the Gear 360 on the phone. At the same time, there are rich settings to adjust, just like the phone's own camera interface.
Samsung also provides users with CyberLink Gear 360 Action Director for free. This software allows us to clip videos on PC computers. This editing tool is a simplified version of CyberLink PowerDirector. If you have used this video editing tool before, I think you should be familiar with using CyberLink Gear 360 Action Director, The video you have edited can be stored on your computer or uploaded to Facebook and YouTube. The software supports H.264 and H.265 encoding.
(Action Director interface)
camera
Gear 360 has two 15 megapixel cameras, both of which are fish eye lenses, and can take 180 ° or 360 ° videos and photos. This means that the photo size can reach 30 million pixels. Both lenses have an aperture of f/2.0, which should not be too bad in low light environments. At the same time, they also support the automatic HDR function.
Under the condition of good daylight, the photos taken are quite good. Thanks to the high pixel camera, the details of the photos are very rich. With a VR device, you can also watch immersive VR photos. However, when you carefully compare the photos taken by flagship phones such as Gear 360 and Galaxy S7, You will find that the Gear 360 still cannot match the photos taken by them, even though its pixels are higher than many flagship phones.
At night, you can adjust the sensitivity of the camera to take better pictures. Unfortunately, you cannot manually adjust the sensitivity value. Only ISO 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400 are available. At ISO 1600 or above, the samples taken will become difficult to see, with distorted colors and obvious blurring, Although it is not a big problem to watch on the mobile phone screen or upload to social media, if you watch with VR devices, you will find that the quality of photos is very poor.
Next, let's look at some samples
The recorded video can be uploaded to Facebook, Google+or YouTube, but during the upload process, the video quality will drop sharply due to compression. In our test, after taking a UHD video and uploading it to the social platform, we found that the compressed video quality is the same as the same 480P video. The video quality recorded by Gear 360 is good, and the sound captured by the microphone is also very clear, with a resolution of up to 3840 x 1920 (30fps), which Samsung officially calls 4K, but I don't think this resolution can be called 4K. If you want to shoot 60fps video, you have to reduce the resolution to 2560 x 1280.
Unfortunately, when two cameras work at the same time to take 360 ° photos, the samples taken do not look very good, and the photo joints are obvious. This disadvantage is obvious when taking photos, but it was not found when recording videos. In addition, the two lenses are enough to measure the light in the shooting area independently. Even in places with very complex light, the two cameras can take pictures of good quality, but the same is true when taking 360 ° photos, the defects of photo joints will be more obvious.
(It can be seen that there are obvious traces at the joint of the two lenses)
Before shooting standard color cards and test cards, we adjusted the light and did not set the camera in advance. When we checked the shooting samples of ColorChecker Passort after shooting, we found that the color was a little too full, and the gray and white scales were a little too dark.
（ColorChecker Passort）
In the shooting sample of the test card, the details are still very rich, even at the edge. However, it can be clearly observed that the tolerance of the camera is not high, and the black text in the dark area can be seen blurred.
(Test card shooting)
Systems and accessories
The best way to control the camera is through the phone, because only in this way can you adjust various settings of the camera. The camera itself only has some simple functions and settings, most of which are adjusted through the app on the phone. Users can switch multiple shooting modes, adjust Bluetooth settings, resolution, timers, etc. The 0.5 inch PMOLED screen on the camera can display Bluetooth status, remaining power and remaining storage space.
(0.5 inch display)
Samsung's Gear 360 box contains: the camera itself, a small tripod, a cleaning rag and a USB cable, as well as a stack of instructions in English and German, warranty instructions and free download instructions for CyberLink Gear 360 Action Director. There is no charging head in the box. It seems that Samsung does not want to provide charging connectors for its cameras. Gear 360 has a 24 month warranty policy, and its accessories are 6 months.
fever
The Gear 360 is very hot, which is a bit unexpected. Even when it is idle, the surface temperature of the camera may reach 42.8 ℃. If you record video at the highest resolution, it can even reach 47.3 ℃. This means that the Gear 360 will be very hot.
(The machine will be forced to shut down for heat dissipation after overheating)
During our test, the weather temperature was still warm, about 28 ℃. After the camera recorded about 12 minutes of video, the fuselage became a little hot, and then it automatically shut down to reduce the fuselage temperature. Even if the device is normally used at 28 ℃ for about 20 minutes, it will become very hot. However, according to Samsung's official statement, the device can be used at 0 ℃ - 35 ℃ in theory.
Battery life
The Samsung Gear 360 is equipped with a removable lithium battery with a capacity of 1350 mAh. If you just use the Gear 360 to take photos, the battery can last for a whole day. We calculated that the total usage time is 2 hours and 30 minutes. However, if you like to record video, the battery is not so strong, It will shut down after about 64 minutes of use.
Since there is no Gear 360 battery on the market at present, we recommend that you take a power bank with you to go out. Especially if you want to record videos for a long time, the power bank is absolutely necessary. We use Galaxy S7 Edge The charger of is used to charge the Gear 360. The full charge time is about 1 hour and 30 minutes.
summary
Samsung's Gear 360 is definitely one of the best panoramic cameras at present, and its price is also reasonable. But there is no denying that it does have some flaws, such as the obvious gap at the joint of 360 ° photos, and the camera's "outdoor sports" is not very high, it is only resistant to rain, and it cannot be directly thrown into the water, The protective glass outside the lens is not very scratch resistant. Finally, we are worried about the heat of the camera. If you like VR and 360 ° photos, Gear 360 is a good choice. Although it is the first generation product, it still makes us feel a bit amazing to some extent. However, I think it may not be very attractive for professionals.
Bonus points
√ High pixel
√ Good manufacturing process
√ Complimentary ActionDirector editing software
√ The overall quality of the camera is high
√ Support microSD card expansion
Negative equinox
* Poor endurance during video recording
× The machine will automatically shut down if it overheats
× Lens glass is not scratch resistant
* Only compatible with Samsung mobile phones
The above pictures and texts are translated and arranged from
