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Insta360° Air Quick Review

Written By Ustin Nuyda
Published • September 30th, 2017
CamerasGadget Reviews
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With the rising popularity of 360° photos and videos on social media, companies have decided to jump on the trend and come out with user-friendly cameras, many of which provide quality 360° videos on a budget. One of these cameras is the Insta360° Air, a pocket-sized smartphone add-on that turns your device into a 360° camera. Let’s take a look and see if it’s a formidable entry to the growing market.

Table of Contents

Design and Construction

The Insta360° Air comes in a very sturdy white box. The unit itself is encased in high-quality black foam, protecting it from bumps and scratches in the unfortunate event that you get a bad case of butterfingers, and drop it. As long as it’s in the box, it should be a-ok!

Inside the box, you get the unit itself, a silicone case to protect the camera when not in use, a tool needle, cleaning cloth, a warranty card, and finally the quickstart guide.

The build of the insta360° is solid and the materials have a great quality to them. It’s about the size of a golf ball, which makes for easy storage. The cameras are placed on opposite sides, and adjacent to them is the Insta360 Air text.

The Insta360° Air comes in both USB Type-C and Micro-USB. The connection port is at the bottom of the unit, and near is an exhaust port for heat. In the case that you buy the wrong type of USB connector type, this can easily be resolved with an adapter. Considering how small the port is, and how the unit sticks out of the phone, we’d recommend you storing it after use, to reduce the risk of damage.

Camera and Software

To use the Insta360° Air you would need to install the official Insta360 Air App. Once the app is installed, you can plug in the unit into your phone. Note that you must have auto-rotation turned on, since most ports are at the bottom of the phone. Plugging in the unit will automatically launch the Insta360 app.

The application is very simple and easy to use. It’s more or less like using the default camera app, just with more options to choose from. The app lets you capture images, record videos or live-steam to Facebook or YouTube. It has beautification and a collection of filters and stickers. On the home screen, you can even see the community of people that use the Insta360, which is a pretty neat feature on its own.

The app itself is used to convert the photos to videos or take screenshots from the 360° pictures you took. You can edit photos and put stickers on them for more fun.

In the app, you can preview the photos or videos you took through the gallery. The viewing options are Default, Tiny Planet, Crystal Ball or Flat. In a nutshell, the app’s load times are decent, it’s easy to navigate, and all the options you could possibly want with 360° media are there. Here are some sample images we took:

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Here are a couple samples of photos exported as videos from the official application.

In well-lit areas the Insta360° is great. There are some overblown shadows and highlights on the pictures that we took, but overall the colors are great and sharpness is decent. We tried one of the filters and it came out just as we expected it to come out–looking like an Instagram filter. You can choose what angle or position to take a screenshot of by pinching and dragging the image. It’s a really useful function if you just want to take a creative photo. The stitching of the photos is pretty good, but there are some areas that distorted. The app comes with a Fringe Fix option that improves the stitching. While it does a good job overall, it could be better.

The Insta360° Air will support phones with the following specs:
Supports OTG
Android 5.1 or above
Qualcomm: 600 Series or 800 Series
MTK: Helio X10, X20, X25, X30 Series
Exynos: 7410, 8890
Huawei Kirin: Kirin9xx Series
RAM: 2G or above

The Insta360° Air also supports both iOS and Android phones.

Conclusion

For the price of around Php6000, the Insta 360° Air is an affordable but exceptional camera, great for those getting into the world of 360° media. With most major social media platforms such as Youtube and Facebook supporting 360° videos, we don’t see why you wouldn’t pick this up!

The Insta 360° Air is available on Lazada here.

Insta360° Air Specs:F2.4 Aperture

F2.4 Aperture
210-degree ultra-wide-angle cameras
3008 x 1504 (3k) Photo capture resolution
2560 x 1280 Video capture resolution
30 frames per second videos
26.5 grams
USB micro/Type-C Connector

What we liked about it: