I have been interested in the modern 360 degree panorama cameras. Following a review of the Xiaomi Mi Sphere by ‘Life in 360‘ (thanks for the info Ben!) I decided to purchase one. After spending the first day trying to get to know the camera and the software and it being a fine day, today I took it outside into the garden for a trial.
First impressions: The camera is very good, especially for the price paid (under £200) but aspects of the software are a bit flakey.
Here is a complete panorama (it looks strange but the stretching is like an atlas where the poles get stretched out):
and a segment looks like this:
Quite good detail – I am quite pleased with it all. To view the final, stitched photos you need a suitable viewer – I used the ‘Insta360player’. With this you can zoom in as in the above view or zoom right out as in this view:
Because it is a full 360 degree camera, you can see my hand holding the handle at the bottom.
One issue, nothing to do with the camera or its software, was when I tweaked the photo in Photoshop. The join became visible! (As shown below). I need to investigate this more fully:
You can just see the line to the left of my head going through the edge of the brim of the hat. This doesn’t show at all in the original.
Now as for the software it is both good and bad. Although you can take photos or video manually using the camera buttons, you have full control from using an app on a smartphone. This works fine most of the time (although I wish I could get rid of the photo gallery every time I start the app) but I had it crash twice and once it crashed the whole phone – Android restarted itself – not good. Most of the time though it does work OK.
The app connects with the phone via wifi – this is good and makes for a fine remote control. You can also download the initial fisheye image pairs into the phone where they get stitched together. But, and this is a biggish but, the app looks at the processor and if it doesn’t meet the grade it stitched the images at a lower resolution – bummer. I discovered this at ‘360 rumors‘.
Then I found there was a PC app which I tried. This needs some refinement – it is buggy and clunky to use. It will happily generate totally black images and videos. I think this happens when you click ‘select all’ to process all the images. When I clicked them individually it seemed to work. Once you get used to its quirks (don’t go back to get more photos to process, close and restart the app instead) then it works OK generating the stitched images and videos.
As an aside, the PC couldn’t connect to the camera using wifi (the password was repeatedly rejected) but the cable connection worked fine but you had to manually copy them into the PC.
The camera specs indicate that bluetooth is available but there are no controls. Exploring the files on the camera and found one which had ‘bluetooth=false’ I changed this to true and managed to pair my phone to it but couldn’t do anything. Perhaps a later release of the firmware and app will change this.
Thanks again to ‘Life in 360‘ and ‘360 rumors‘.