This is the Insta360 X6. And the biggest upgrade here isn’t the new AI chips or the new AI editing feature, which is really cool, by the way. It’s not the custom-designed 1/1.1-inch sensors that give this thing some incredible imagery. It’s not the new 8K at 50 frames a second. It’s not the fact that you can pair the mics to it and get clean audio no matter how far away from the camera you are. And it’s not even the new design that makes it smaller and more compact, even though they’ve packed more features into it. No, the biggest upgrade to this thing has to do with the color.
Insta360 sponsored the video this article is based on. The links in my video description are affiliate links — they don’t cost you anything extra, but they help me out, and the first 15 people who use them get a free dual-lens replacement kit.
Five Hours to Valdez With a Camera Stuck to My Car
The first way I wanted to test this camera was just using it like a car rig. Because 360 cameras have insanely good stabilization, you can basically put them anywhere and get a usable shot. I did that for a ton of the five-hour drive down to Valdez, and I came back with tons of footage — all of it on one battery, by the way.
It was just me walking around the car, sticking the camera magnetically wherever I felt like there might be a good shot, filming, then coming back and reframing it in post. That worked really well, except for the fact that I forgot it’s Alaska in the summer, and we have a lot of bugs up here in the summer. One particular hyperlapse went great right up until the front of the camera got covered in bugs. That’s what happens when you leave a camera on the front of your car for an hour and a half of driving through Alaska.
A 16-Foot Selfie Stick and a Kayak
The other way I wanted to test it is the way I use 360 cameras a lot, which is getting odd angles — angles that aren’t possible with any other kind of action camera, or any camera at all. That includes sticking it off the back of my car on a 16-foot selfie stick just to see what sort of footage I could get.
The X6 does pretty well there. It does really well, in fact, and it has pretty dang good dynamic range. But I think the best way to illustrate how you can use a 360 camera in ways you can’t use any other camera is when I go kayaking, because those kinds of angles are just impossible to get with anything else.
The Dynamic Range Test: A Helicopter Cockpit Over a Glacier
Insta360 says it improved the dynamic range of this camera quite a bit, and from what I can tell so far, that seems true. But I had one of the ultimate tests coming up, because we were going out in a helicopter to a glacier ice cave. That let me test two things at once: dynamic range, and the 10-bit color in this camera.
This is maybe one of the best dynamic range tests there is. You have insanely bright sunlit white snow and glaciers outside the cockpit, and inside the helicopter almost everything is black. I have to say there’s a huge jump in dynamic range in the X6 compared to the X5, the X4, and the X3 — all of which Heli Pilot Leigh and I use in various scenarios. Leigh uses them a ton inside and outside her helicopter, so being able to shoot with those alongside the X6 and show the difference here was pretty awesome. There’s a huge difference, and the X6 has a pretty massive jump in image quality.
When You Can’t Afford to Think About the Camera
This is one of the best use cases for a 360 camera: when you need your full concentration on what you’re doing so you don’t get seriously injured or hurt. That includes high-movement sports like downhill skiing, snowboarding, and biking — all the things where you don’t want to think about where the camera is pointed or what the camera is doing.
You want to be able to just film and then actively go through whatever your activity is without getting injured. That’s where a 360 camera is really, really tough to beat.
Inside the Ice Cave, Waterproof to 66 Feet
This cave is the whole reason we came out here. Literally the whole reason. It’s incredible — one of the best ice caves I’ve ever seen, and it’s also huge.
This is probably a good time to mention that the X6 is completely waterproof to 20 meters, or 66 feet. Hopefully we weren’t going underwater in the ice cave, but you know, it’s a possibility.
Low Light Several Hundred Feet Under Glacier Ice
Once we were several hundred feet underneath glacier ice and deep inside this cave, that’s where the new triple AI chip system really came into play. It was incredibly dark down there. Very, very dark.
The fact that this camera produced this quality of image out of that cave is pretty mind-blowing, because in the past I wouldn’t have shot anything down there with a 360 camera. It just wouldn’t have been worth it. But the X6 held its own and did a pretty good job. It’s impressive that I was able to use InstaFrame 2.0 on the low-light footage and capture what I captured.
Interestingly enough, the low-light footage can be shot in a 10-bit normal color profile or a 10-bit log color profile. So you can still color grade your low-light footage while getting the advantage of that built-in noise reduction.
120-Megapixel Photos I Didn’t Think a 360 Camera Could Take
I don’t know what Insta360 is doing differently with this camera when it comes to photos, but there is something different, because I’ve never been able to capture photos like these from a 360 camera. Look at the detail in the rocks. Look at the dynamic range. Yes, it’s blown out in the highlights, but this is an insane dynamic range.
We’re deep underneath this ice cave where it’s fairly dark, and we’ve got sunlight streaming down through a massive hole in the ice above. The fact that this camera captured that scene so well is kind of insane. And then the fact that you can reframe it, with 120 megapixels to work with, is wild. Some of the other photos I’ve captured with this camera are also just really, really good — and again, being able to reframe the photo after the fact and make it what you want, where you want, is insanely impressive.
So Why Use a 360 Camera at All?
Why would you want a 360 camera when an action camera, or a gimbal camera like the Insta360 Luna, will give you a higher quality image of whatever you’re pointed straight at?
Well, it’s like I’ve said up to this point. There are times when you need to be fully focused on what you’re doing but you still want to capture a shot. And there are times when you want to capture a shot that is absolutely impossible with any other kind of camera.
Insta360 Studio and the New AI Editing in the App
Working with a 360 camera is a little different, and Insta360 has provided some incredibly good tools for it. One of those is the Studio app. In there you can reframe, track a subject, and set the camera up however you want in post, then export the footage however you’d like — whether you want the look already baked in or the log footage. You can do a lot of work with the audio or the stitching too. It’s pretty impressive how much you can do in the Studio app or in the Studio software on a desktop.
They’ve also included a new AI editing system in the Insta360 app on your phone. What I found worked best, at least with the beta version I was working with, is to download the footage to your phone, select the clips you want the system to pull from, and let it do its thing. A few minutes later you have an AI-edited video that’s pretty much ready to post on social media. And honestly, it does a pretty good job.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen something like this where I thought, yeah, there are definitely times I’d go through that, grab three or four or five clips, have it edited together, and have something ready to post.
Mics, Dolby Vision, ND Filters, and the New Selfie Stick
There are a few more things you need to know about the X6. Yes, it works with the Mic Pro and the Mic Air. So if you want a waterproof camera that still gets good audio, you can have it — you’ve heard a lot of that audio throughout the video, whether it was in the car or in the ice cave using the Mic Pro. It worked really well.
Insta360 has also included Dolby Vision on the X6, which is essentially a Rec. 2020 HLG wide dynamic range, or HDR, workflow. So if you want to pull this into DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut, or Premiere and work in an HDR or wide dynamic range workspace, you can. That only plays back on devices capable of playing back HDR footage, but you have the option now with the X6, which is very cool.
There are accessories too, like the ND filters you saw throughout the video — that’s how I was able to get the helicopter blades to blur the way they should, because I had proper motion blur. And there’s a new selfie stick with pins on the bottom that mate with pins on the bottom of the camera. It’ll charge the battery in the camera, and it also gives you the ability to start and stop recording, turn the camera on and off, and a couple of other things. It’s a quick connect, so you just snap it in and it’s ready to go, which is super cool. And just in case you’re wondering, yes, it does have user-replaceable lenses like the X5 did.
The X6 also has 47GB of built-in internal storage. I don’t recommend relying on internal storage, because if something happens to the camera it’s better to have your footage on an SD card you can remove from the shattered remains of your camera. Ask me how I know. But it’s good to know it’s there in case you forget an SD card.
What’s Next: The Dive Case
There’s a lot more to cover with this camera, and unfortunately I didn’t have time to do anything with the dive case — which I will get to in a few days. So watch for a video about that, because I’ve got some cool shot ideas planned for the dive case with the X6 in it.
As always, if you have questions, ask me in the comments. Or you can join my live stream, which happens most Wednesday nights at 4:00 p.m. Alaska time, 8:00 p.m. Eastern. We can have more of a conversation, and I can answer questions I maybe didn’t get to in the video.
This article was written based on Jake Sloan’s Insta360 X6 review, published on his YouTube channel. You can find more of Jake’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.
