Insta360’s One RS The modular action camera is one of our favorites. The ability to swap lenses, from a typical action cam wide-angle lens, to a 360 lens, to a Leica-designed lens with a 1-inch sensor, makes it more versatile than a GoPro. Insta360 now builds on this modular foundation with the new One RS 1-inch 360 Edition.
The 1-inch 360 Edition has dual lenses and dual 1-inch sensors co-designed with Leica and builds on the system that One RS owners already have. The core module is the same as the action camera, but the new 360 version adds a larger battery, a case to hold the battery and core module, and a lens unit with dual sensors and lenses that are on the side top, like ice cream in a cone.
The result is a camera that produces the best 360-degree video image I’ve ever seen. Insta360 also has a video editor that makes it easy to edit footage. If you’re into 360 video, this is the camera to get.
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I have to say, I’ve never been a big fan of 360 video. That’s mostly because, well, the human eye doesn’t have a 360-degree view of the world. Of course, there are virtual reality glasses that hardly anyone has or uses so far, but even then you can’t see them all at once. The only use case that makes sense to me is capturing an entire scene in 360 because you don’t know in advance where you want to point the camera. Later, you can edit the video in normal view. This use case means you must have a good video editor. Insta360 is the only 360 camera system I’ve used that makes editing your 360 footage easy enough to make it worth shooting.
But if you like 360-degree footage for its own sake, this camera is remarkable. The footage I recorded is sharper and captures more detail than any other 360 camera I’ve used, including several past Insta360 efforts. If 360-degree video is your thing, this is the camera for you.
Between the two sensors, you get 6K video (a step up from the 5.7K the previous version’s Mod 360 is capable of recording) and 21MP stills. Combined with the improved sensors, these lenses are much more capable than the much smaller lenses of the 360 Mod sold with the action camera. Video quality is noticeably better than what I was able to capture with the One RS. It is sharper and has less noise. This was especially evident when shooting in low light and zooming in to look at leaves, grass or signs.
6K video sounds like crazy high resolution, and it would be on the regular camera, but the pro-level cameras that shoot footage for the VR glasses that nobody buys usually do 10K and more. Still, 6K is a step up for consumer-level cameras. The clarity here is good enough that if you’re framing and cropping to produce normal video, you shouldn’t notice much of a difference in video quality to footage shot with a 4K camera. This is especially true if the destination of your video is YouTube or TikTok, which compress the video a lot anyway.
This opens up the possibility of using the Insta360 One RS 360 Edition as a one-person camera rig. Any 360 camera can do this, of course, but the improved video quality of the 360 edition means that remastered footage doesn’t suffer the loss of quality that it would from doing this on most other 360 platforms.
Photography: Insta360
