Last November I reviewed the Kitvision Immerse 360 Action Camera for Coolsmartphone.com, and whilst generally my experience was positive, there was still plenty of room for improvement. The Kitvision Immerse 360 Duo is the latest version in the Duo range but does it improve on the original?? Let’s have a look.
Two Camera’s are better than One right?
The first thing I noticed when comparing the original Immerse 360 to the new Immerse 360 Duo is that the newer unit has two cameras mounted front and rear, rather than the single top mounted lens of the original. Whilst this leads to the duo being significantly bigger, it should mean that the field of vision is improved and remove the constant feeling of having to look up.
The camera’s specs are reasonable, F2.0, 360 degrees, at an angle of 220 degrees, and being able to record full HD video and capture 360 stills at 5MP.
The camera has integrated WiFi allowing you to connect your smartphone to view your recordings, however like me you may wish to use a removable Micro SD memory card to retrieve your photos and videos. Although the official documentation states a limit of 32GB for removable storage in my testing 64GB cards worked fine, whereas of the original Immerse 360 camera had a hard limit of 32GB.
The Camera Quality
The quality of the recorded image on the Immerse 360 Duo is undeniably a step above that of the original Immerse 360, what extra camera certainly helps to capture a fuller more immersive image, although it’s not perfect.
As you’ll see in the 360 degree YouTube videos below you occasionally get a slight tearing of image where I presume the images of the cameras meet.
This first example video was recorded on a bird feeder, although the birds didn’t seem to be to keen, it shows the potential for wildlife photography. If you look to the left of the feeding stand you’ll see an example of the image tearing.
This second video shows a home made wildlife pond, can you spot the spider? In this instance the image tearing is in a really unfortunate position
Is Underwater photography possible on the Kitvision Immerse 360 Duo?
Unfortunately a waterproof case is no longer provided so underwater filming is a no for now.
The Waterproof case on the original Immerse 360 is still a great selling point and allows great videos like the following example, it’s a crying shame that the Immerse 360 Duo can’t record this type of video, although you can see that the image quality is now improved on the Duo.
Included Accessories
So the lack of waterproof case is a shame, but the Kitvision Immerse 360 Duo does come with some great accessories, three of which instantly catch the eye, a Tripod, a cardboard VR headset and a remote control you wear on your wrist.
The tripod is high quality, has 3 posable legs and is pretty rugged allowing you to set up some pretty exciting shots, the VR headset is a good quality Google Cardboard clone and easily allows you to use the recommended App to view your 360 videos in an immersive Virtual Reality fashion.
Intriguingly there is no evidence of the wrist control in any supporting documentation, but it’s a great addition allowing you to take photos and record video very easily. The wrist control requires no additional set up and works straight out of the box.
Sharing your 360 Degree Videos
As with the original Immerse:
With its 360 viewing mode, YouTube makes a natural place to store and share your videos. However, before you can upload your video you need to convert it to the appropriate format. To do this you need to you use the desktop version of the Symax application. Editing 360 video is an interesting challenge as there are a number of steps that you need to go through in order to crop or alter your video.
The guys at Kitvision had to provide some support here, so I’ve tested the process and here is the steps to follow:
How to Edit 360 Degree Video
- Download your video to your PC
- Either use a USB cable or the MicroSD card to download the videos to your PC
- Convert the video using the Symax360 application
- Load the video into the player
- Press the Open Converter Option
- Change the Video Quality to high
- Save the video
- Edit the video in any video editor e.g. Windows Movie Maker
- After your edits are complete, export the video in the same format as the original file.
- Turn the video back into a 360-degree video
- You’ll need to insert 360 metadata into the file
- Download the app at https://support.google.com/
youtube/answer/6178631?hl=en- GB under the ‘Prepare for upload’ tab. - Run the app and select your video to open it
- Select the tick box for Spherical and click Save as.
If you have followed the process then your video editing is now complete. It’s quite clear that this process isn’t for beginners, and I wish that this process could be simplified as it reduces the accessibility.
Final Thoughts
The Kitvision 360 video technology is starting to get there and this is a step ahead of the original Immerse 360, but there is still room for improvement particularly in the following three areas:
- The image quality is better but can still be improved
- Editing videos is still a right pain
- I miss the waterproof casing
You can purchase the Kitvision Immerse 360 Duo here
