It’s unclear what Insta360 has been feeding its team lately, but so far, the company has managed to release a new product almost every month since March. It’s also an interesting combination: its modular action camera upgrade, a 360 camera drone accessory, a 6K 360 camera with 1-inch sensors, and more recently, a gimbal webcam. Today, after nearly two years since the One X2, Insta360 is finally upgrading its flagship 360 all-in-one camera with the aptly named X3, with the main differences being enlarged sensors, touchscreen, and battery, among other things.
the Insta360 X3 (without the “One” sub-brand going forward) continues to have the candy bar form factor and, like its predecessor, is waterproof to 33ft/10m out of the box. That said, it’s worth remembering that you’ll still need the optional diving case with special optics to capture stills or images underwater. The X3 is also a bit thicker, mainly due to its larger 1,800mAh removable battery, a notable jump from the previous 1,630mAh.
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Another factor contributing to the extra weight is the 2.29-inch rectangular touchscreen with tempered glass, which replaces the old circular screen for easy viewing and control. This is complemented by two additional glove-friendly physical buttons: one for toggling a customizable “Quick Menu” to access your shooting presets, and another for quickly toggling between 360 and single-lens mode.
As before, the X3 outputs 360 video at 5.7K resolution with “Flow State Stabilization” and steering focus audio, but this time it benefits from its larger 1/2-inch 48-megapixel sensors, Same as the recent Link gimbal. webcam, in fact, for better image quality. Also new is support for active HDR when shooting 360 video, which is a step up from the X2’s normal HDR mode. As for 360 stills, you can output a massive 72-megapixel resolution instead of the usual 18, but you can only do this through the Insta360 Studio desktop software.
Insta360 also added a few new shooting modes, the most notable being “Me Mode” for directly capturing “flat” selfie videos ([email protected]) with the already invisible selfie stick. This saves you the hassle of re-framing 360 footage before you can output a “flat” video like in the old days. But, of course, there’s nothing stopping you from using “Deep Track 2.0” (manual target selection) or “Auto Frame” (AI-selected highlights), if you insist on capturing everything in 360 degrees just in case. Not to mention the app’s Shot Lab feature, which offers over 30 cool effects for you to experiment with.
Another new feature is 8K 360 time-lapse, which is apparently a much-requested feature, along with a new 4K option for single-lens mode (but you can dial up to 2.7K for the wide 170-degree field of view). However, these two require good lighting conditions to work properly. Last but not least, there is now a “Loop Recording” mode that essentially turns your X3 into a 360 dashcam (for motorcyclists, for example), only keeping, at most, the last 30 minutes of footage.
The Insta360 X3 is available now for $450, which is slightly more expensive than the X2 but still more affordable than the $800 prosumer-grade One RS 360 Edition 1-inch.
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