At night, though, the X6 wins. It’s much brighter than the X5 or the GoPro for starters, and while sometimes it does render colors a little wonky, with blues tending toward green and yellows going more orange than they are in real life, it still produces the best 360-degree low-light footage I’ve shot. The Osmo 360 is a close second, but at times I find it has quite a bit of weird blur-like artifacts in low light.
One of the more exciting new features is single-lens mode, which, at least on the spec sheet, goes a long way to making the X6 a viable action camera replacement. I dream of one camera that can do it all, and the X6 is definitely closer than other 360 cameras in fulfilling that wish.
The X6 can now record up to 5K video in single-lens mode (up from 4K in the X5), but even better is the new InstaFrame 2.0 feature, which is Insta360’s name for the ability to record both 360 video and a single-lens shot at the same time. This greatly simplifies editing since you have a flat file to work from, and if you miss the shot in that one, you have the 360 footage to fall back on. This was always a great feature, but in the X5 the non-360 file was capped at 1080p, which made it less than useful. The X6 bumps that footage to 4K for the single-lens recording and up to 8K at 30 frames per second for the 360 footage recorded simultaneously, which makes this very usable and is, in fact, how I shot most of the time.
As I have said many times, no one wants to see raw 360 footage (yeah, yeah, I know VR is going to catch on one day, but I am not holding my breath), and while InstaFrame makes editing it down to a traditional linear video file about as easy as is possible, it is still kind of a pain. Advanced users will also find it annoying that you cannot use Insta360’s I-Log format (video log modes are to video what a RAW file is to still images, and capture a much wider dynamic range) with InstaFrame 2.0, but there are some pretty good preset color modes, and I recommend using them for everyday shots.
With I-Log, the X6 supports 10-bit recording when recording in 360 mode. In single-lens mode, you can only shoot in 8-bit I-Log. The higher the bit rate, the more color information is available (1,024 shades in 10-bit versus 256 in 8-bit). That’s a shame because, at least for my needs, this stops the X6 from replacing an action camera in my kit. Perhaps we’ll get this in the X7. For non-pro users, this is likely a moot point.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson