So, this is the brand new Insta360 X6. I’ve been putting this camera through its paces over the last month and a half across all sorts of different scenarios — underwater, on the water, on the ground, you name it — all to figure out where it works well and where it falls short. In this review, I’m going to dive into what is actually new. Not just the marketing junk they want you to hear, but whether or not these new features actually work and where some of them fall short, because not all of them are as good as they might seem.

As always, no company is paying for my reviews, nor do they have any rights to view them beforehand. That is super critical in this space. With that, I’ll simply dive into it.

A Shorter, Wider Body — and On-Screen Buttons I Don’t Love

The very first thing is that this camera is a little bit shorter than its previous generation. It’s also a smidge wider than the past. It’s not quite as short as the GoPro or DJI cameras, but it’s also not as wide. I like the new size, but I could also use it just a little bit smaller if we can get there.

Now, with that smaller case size comes a smaller screen than in the past — you can see it side by side with the X5 as well as the other cameras. I’m mostly fine with the new screen itself. But you may have noticed that they removed the buttons below it compared to the X5. Instead, these buttons basically show up along the bottom of the screen, and then you use a force touch system. There’s now haptic feedback — or basically a vibration motor, as it’s more commonly known — so you can feel when you’re pushing down on the screen. This isn’t great in my opinion. I think it’s something that’s fine, but it’s not as good as just a real physical button. You still have buttons on the side, but again, more buttons is better.

The last of the external things I’m going to talk about before we dive into the insides is the bottom. There’s a regular tripod mount that’s always been there, but you’ll notice there are now contact points. Those contact points are power. So you can basically have a power mount — there’s a powered version of the selfie stick as well — that feeds battery into the Insta360 X6. Super cool addition.

New Replaceable Lenses — and the One I Scratched Anyway

The final external thing is that the company says they’ve improved the hardening on these lenses. These are replaceable lenses, just like they had with the X5. They are not compatible with the X5, though — different lenses. The new lenses are supposed to resist scratches better and are also cheaper.

That said, I did manage to scratch one of my lenses on a very simple drop from a little table down to the ground. It’s like a foot and a half or so, and it just simply slipped off the table, hit the ground, and scratched the lens. The surface is a faux wood — it’s actually tile that looks like wood. I’ve also dropped this camera many other times, and it hasn’t scratched. So take that for what you will.

Bigger Sensors: How the X6 Stacks Up Against GoPro and DJI

The biggest internal improvement, if you will, is the change in sensors. They’ve gone from a 1/1.28-inch sensor to a 1/1.1-inch sensor — essentially the same sensor as in the DJI Osmo 360 camera. And again, these are dual sensors, because there are of course two different lenses.

So let’s look at how this compares side by side to a couple of other cameras. Starting off in bright conditions, the X6 is definitely overexposing a little. The GoPro and DJI cameras look fine to me here — they’re pretty much spot on where I would expect. In another shot on the bike, the overexposure at first is so subtle you don’t even notice it. It’s only once I start panning around the front and my subject gets back into the brightness that you see the overexposure in the Insta360 X6 shot. Meanwhile, earlier in the morning on the jet skis, where it’s not so bright, all of these look pretty good across the board — very, very similar.

In a bunker-type location with graffiti in the background, we see a bit more depth and contrast in the GoPro footage than the X6 footage, and the DJI kind of splits the difference between the two. Another shot is interesting: in that case, the GoPro coloring is simply not correct. I would say the X6 coloring is maybe a little bit darker and more contrasty than it really is in real life, with the DJI managing to stick the landing in the middle.

The thing to remember in single-lens shots is that both DJI and Insta360 allow 5K, but GoPro only allows 4K in single-lens mode — despite the fact that GoPro actually captures more pixels in 360 mode. If you zoom in in post-production, you can clearly see the difference between DJI and Insta360 in single-lens mode. But the kicker is that if I switch over to 360 footage instead, where the GoPro is actually shooting more pixels — a true 8K frame versus the other two at 7.2K — it’s more or less a wash between these on tree bark zoomed in to 400%. Also notable: the color is more correct on the GoPro and Insta360 than the DJI on that one, for whatever reason. These shots were shot back to back.

10-Bit, I-Log, and Dolby Vision

The next item on the list: there’s finally 10-bit recording in their 360 cameras. We saw Insta360 add it to their Ultra Pocket series this past spring and summer, and now we’re seeing it come to other cameras, including this one. You simply swipe down the menus and enable 10-bit there. That includes I-Log footage, by the way, up to 8K50, though there are some minor limitations around that.

Next, they’ve added Dolby Vision recording to the Pro settings — basically something you can swipe in and toggle. I would say this is mostly a shrug in real life. This is a great spec thing, right? It’s a thing they’ve put all over the marketing. In real life though, nobody actually supports it for the most part. There is a handful of people who will find this useful, but most people will be like, shrug.

The New 4nm Chipset: 8K50, 5K Single-Lens, and InstaFrame 2.0

Instead, one thing that’s seemingly minor but is probably a bigger deal is that they’ve changed from a 5-nanometer chipset down to a 4-nanometer chipset. And with that, they’re lighting up a bunch of things that happen on the device itself.

First off, they’ve gone from 8K30 up to 8K50 for the frame rate on the 360 recording side. You’re also seeing the single-lens footage increase dramatically from 4K up to 5K. This means you can record a single lens at a time for a flat view. For example, if you have it on a chest mount, there’s no reason to record 360 because you can’t see my chest — well, you can anyway. Might as well just save the battery and record one lens at 5K60. Or you can do 4K120 frames per second if you want to capture something in slow-mo.

One of the things they’ve done with this increased power is upgrade to InstaFrame 2.0. That’s a marketing term that means you can record both a 360 shot as well as a flat file shot, which simplifies the editing workflow quite a bit. In the past, that flat file was limited to 1080p, which isn’t super awesome, and the 360 was also limited to roughly 5K. Now, the 360 backup footage, as I call it, is all the way up to 8K30, and the main flat file footage is at 4K — basically four times the resolution compared to 1080p, which is a huge, huge leap.

This is probably what most people should be recording in, because it basically just makes your life a whole crap-ton easier. You just go out, record what you want, and in theory it gets the right shot. And if it doesn’t get the right shot, then you go back to the 360 footage you would have had to sift through anyway.

AI Director Now Runs on the Camera Itself

In fact, talking about sifting through footage, one of the things Insta360 has added to this camera is their AI Director. This is something you swipe down and toggle on the camera itself, and all the processing happens on the camera. You know how in the past Insta360 would upload all your footage to the cloud and it would spit out a little video summarizing your day? Now, that happens on camera. It can still happen in the cloud if you want, just like other cameras from GoPro and so on. But otherwise, it happens on camera, and it’ll upload a summary of your day — a little vlog, if you will. You can choose whether you want to prioritize battery charging or prioritize getting it done faster.

Low Light: Brighter, But Not Always Correct

Going back to the sensors, we’ve got to talk about low-light footage. Insta360 has claimed significantly better low-light footage with this camera over the X5, due in part to the sensor upgrades as well as some of the processing it can do.

The best way to see the difference between the X5 and the X6 is switching back and forth between the X5 footage and the X6 footage. Obviously, it is brighter on the X6, but it’s actually not as correct from a color standpoint. There’s a blue bus in my footage that is genuinely blue — it’s literally called the Blue Moon bus. It is blue, not green like the X6 thinks. Just like the bus, the detail is definitely far better on a campfire at night, and the coloring in that shot is better as well.

If I go the complete opposite direction into Times Square, both DJI and Insta360 expose very brightly, because it’s a very bright scenario. The GoPro is a bit dimmer, because the Max 2 isn’t as good in low-light mode. That becomes more evident as I walk down a much quieter street, where the Max 2 starts to struggle in the lower light. The DJI camera does seem to be doing some funky polish stuff on the ground that’s not real in real life, whereas the X6 seems to stick the landing best there. On the other hand, looking at my face, I would say the DJI actually does a better job of getting my face colors correct, while the X6 is again overexposing a little bit.

Underwater With the New Dive Case: A Bit of a Situation

Since we’re on the footage evaluation train, let’s go underwater — it’s probably prettier there anyway. The new Insta360 case for the X6 is obviously different because it’s a different-sized unit, and when it comes to underwater cases, they have to be super perfect for a given unit.

But it’s more than just the case itself. The new underwater case is a situation, if you will. When you use it, you also have to swap out your lenses for underwater lenses that are designed for that particular case. That means you can’t really do it on the boat or wherever you’re going underwater, because from a humidity standpoint, you want to do that in a really low-humidity environment — typically indoors — so you don’t get any fogging. Even by putting the little anti-fog inserts in there, you’re still going to want to do this somewhere indoors before you head out on the water for the day. Which means your camera is really going to be dedicated to that case for the entire day.

Setting that aside, once we go underwater, the shots do look nice. Though, from a stitching standpoint, you can clearly see the stitch line across one of my shots with my wife. If I hold the camera up facing one lens, there’s no stitch line, so it’s nice and clean — but then you lose that 360 effect where the whole pole disappears on you. In talking to Insta360, I sent them a little tidbit of footage, and they said it’s just normal for that particular lens in that particular situation.

It’s also a good time to mention that the underwater resistance has been improved from 15 meters to 20 meters, or 66 feet. But that doesn’t really matter too much, because at the end of the day, if you do not have an underwater case for this, it’s all going to be fuzzy underwater. That’s just the way the optics work for these lenses.

Internal Storage and a Completely Redesigned Battery

Next on the list, a different direction entirely: there is now internal storage in here — 47GB of internal storage compared to zero in the past. This follows what we’ve seen DJI do in their newer cameras. I appreciate that you can still put a microSD card in the side, as I do. But having that internal storage is just handy as a backup in case you popped out the SD card, forgot to put it back in, and went out on your adventure — it’s always there. I’m a huge fan of having a little bit of internal storage inside.

Next up, they’ve redesigned the batteries entirely. Now you have a battery door. In the past, the whole door came off with the battery; now the battery is simply inside there. And it is a beefcake of a battery — a bigger battery than in the past, now 2,600mAh compared to 2,400mAh. This is such a much better design than having the battery as part of the door itself, so I’m really glad they switched in this direction. These batteries are not the same as their Ace Pro 2 cameras, though. Perhaps the Ace Pro 3 will have the same batteries — I hope so, Insta360.

In the meantime, the battery claims have increased quite a bit. They’ve gone from 93 minutes in 8K mode up to 140 minutes in 8K mode. That’s 8K30, no 10-bit recording. My testing results support that claim as well. Insta360 notes that in cooler temperatures you should get better battery life — not cold, because that’s a different realm of battery configuration stuff, but in terms of fall temperatures, it’ll probably do better.

120-Megapixel Photos and AI Reframing

Now we’ll round home with a bunch of photo stuff and a bunch of non-photo random things that are still cool. On the photo side, they’ve increased the megapixels from 72 megapixels up to 120 megapixels. I’ll drop some photos in a share down in my video description, as well as some footage, if you just want to fuss around with it.

Next on the photo side, they’ve added a new AI reframing automatic thingamajig, and it’s actually pretty interesting. The idea is you can take a 360 shot — I just hold the camera up, it takes a shot, boom — and it’s going to give you three different photos plus the original 360 photo. Of those three photos, one is going to be facing you, the subject, automatically reframed toward you. One is going to face the other direction, basically. And one is going to give you that little tiny-world view that you might use once a year before your friends get annoyed with you.

This is a cool concept, and it kind of simplifies some of that workflow. In the past, you would have had to take the 360 photo, reframe it, and so on. This is all about streamlining things. And in fact, I would argue it’s that sort of tiny feature that embodies probably the biggest difference between Insta360 and GoPro and DJI. Those two other companies both have cameras that, from a hardware standpoint, are basically in the same ballpark. GoPro doesn’t have as good low-light footage, but for the rest of the hardware specs, it has proper 8K footage versus this really being 7.2K footage when you do the math. That hasn’t changed here. Instead, Insta360 leans heavily on the software side of things. There’s a gazillion little features like that which Insta360 has and GoPro and DJI just don’t. And those are the sort of things that, for most users, make their life a lot easier.

NFC Tap-to-Connect, Faster Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 6, and USB 3.0

I’ll give you two more features in the general category of usefulness — they’re actually somewhat hardware, not software. The first one is tap-to-connect with NFC. You can basically just tap your phone on the back of the camera to connect to it and start downloading.

Next, they’ve worked heavily on the Bluetooth side of things, so that connection time is one second. I would say that’s optimistic in real-life testing here — it just tends to take longer, with the phone thinking about life, than one second. I’m guessing at the internals level it’s one second; at the software-and-everything-else level, it’s like five to seven seconds.

In the same speeds department, they’ve gone up to Wi-Fi 6.0, which gives you up to 100 megabytes per second of transfer speeds, and USB 3.0, which gives you 450 megabytes per second. That Wi-Fi is how you offload footage from the camera to your phone or up to Insta360’s cloud, and you can use USB if you want to do the same thing at faster speeds to a desktop. And of course, you can still pull the microSD card out of the bottom.

Pricing — and the DJI Osmo 360 II Waiting in the Wings

When it comes to pricing, it starts at $699.99 for the Standard Bundle and $799.99 for one of the Essentials Bundles, and there are lots of other bundles from there. Replaceable lenses are $26 for a single and $32 for the dual. Obviously, you just get the dual, and then you get the batteries from there.

I will have a full comparison video coming between this and the GoPro and DJI models. Obviously, DJI is planning to crash this party with the DJI Osmo 360 II. But if we know anything about DJI’s launches in the last year or so, those of us outside of China won’t see that for months at best — and if you’re in the US, you won’t see it at all unless you go through some random place that will ship it to you. And it seems like the vast majority of the changes there are basically about finally having replaceable lenses like their competitors. But that’s a separate video for a separate day.

Should You Upgrade From the X5?

So, what do I think overall? Well, I think it depends on how you use your Insta360 camera or other 360 camera. If you have, for example, the X5 that shoots at 30 frames per second, the bump to 50 frames per second probably isn’t that big a deal. And while the low-light footage is definitely improved, it’s also not a huge jump like you might have seen from some other cameras.

On the flip side, for things like InstaFrame — the option where you can shoot a flat file version while having the 360 backup — that is a massive upgrade. Going from 1080p to 4K for the flat file, and now to 8K for the 360 footage, is a huge jump for that particular feature. Same goes if you plan to use 10-bit recording — that’s a big jump you wouldn’t have had in the past.

Long story short: if you’re pushing the boundaries of the X5 today, wanting things like 10-bit or wanting to have the backup in 8K while also doing a flat file, then definitely jump to the X6. But if you’re happy with the X5 today, largely shooting at 8K30 and just snipping out the parts you want manually, I would probably stay with that.

Either way, it is cool to see Insta360 doing notable things on the hardware and the software front year after year. They could have easily just sat back and done nothing — maybe changed the replaceable lenses and called it a new version. But they didn’t. They added a bunch of new things here to keep pushing that envelope forward. I’ve got a full comparison video coming out comparing a bunch of these 360 cameras at once on tons of different footage, so stay tuned for that.

This article was written based on Ray’s Insta360 X6 review, published on the DC Rainmaker YouTube channel. You can find more of Ray’s coverage on his DroneXL author page.