Insta360’s New Gimbal Vlogging Camera May Be Too Capable for Its Own Good
The next gimbal-mounted camera you imagined would make you a star TikToker may come with a faint-worthy price tag. With DJI’s popular Osmo Pocket stonewalled from sales in the U.S., Insta360 is pushing the ultimate vlogging device that may be almost too good.
Insta360’s Luna Ultra seems excessive even before you glance at its $770 price tag. Ignoring the twin gimbal-mounted sensors for a moment, the Luna Ultra features a large, 2-inch OLED touchscreen control that can detach from the main body to act as a remote control for the 3-axis gimbal-mounted camera. And that’s not even the most excessive aspect of this camera. © Insta360 © Insta360 The Luna Ultra includes a 1-inch Leica Summicron lens that maxes out shooting at 8K resolution as well as a secondary 1/1.3-inch telephoto lens with an f2.0 aperture. The telephoto sensor supports up to 6X lossless zoom and a 12X digital zoom. Essentially, Insta360 promises that whatever subject you’re trying to film will come out looking clear, especially with support for Leica color profiles and other professional color encoding. For the video editors out there, the camera supports 10-bit I-Log capture and Dolby Vision HDR. Sure, you may be wondering why anybody needs to shoot at 8K resolution on a single gimbal camera. That top 8K, 30 fps mode means you can take the footage and crop it down to something more manageable for Instagram or YouTube without losing picture quality. Otherwise, you can shoot up to 4K and 120 fps or drop it down to 1080p for a maximum 240 fps slow-motion filming. While the Insta360 Luna Ultra comes with 47GB of internal storage just in case you run out of space on your micro SD card, you’ll run out of space plenty fast if you’re only shooting in the highest resolutions.
While you can find DJI’s popular Osmo Pocket 3 vlogging camera for under $500 on sale from sites like B&H, the near-$800 Insta360 Luna Ultra is explicitly geared for those who imagine themselves as professional videographers. In one-man-band scenarios, where you’re trying to capture yourself and your surroundings for a video project without any assistance, having a device for hands-free POV head tracking can come in handy. For amateurs, that price point will still be a sticking point until Insta360 launches some lower-end alternative. The base model does not come with a light attachment, though it will work with Bluetooth mics like the Insta360 Mic Air and Mic Pro. © Insta360 Insta360’s Luna Ultra is set to compete against the long-promised Osmo Pocket 4 Pro, an enhanced version of the most recent Osmo Pocket 4 but with a similar dual-sensor array to the Luna Ultra. We know it supports DJI’s D-Log 2 with 17 stops of dynamic range. PetaPixel reported the China-based drone and camera maker had invited press and influencers out to test the device this week, so expect that the camera’s full details should arrive in short order. The only problem will be buying one if you live in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Your DJI Osmo Pocket 3 will serve you perfectly well as a vlogging camera. The Osmo Pocket 4, on the other hand, is a harder sell. Like all DJI devices, the company’s latest vlogging camera has been restricted from import to the U.S. The Federal Communications Commission has placed DJI as a whole on the Covered List of national security threats surrounding the company’s drone lineup. DJI has collected and sent a mountain of petitions to the FCC in an attempt to convince it to let the company sell its devices stateside. Currently, you can find Osmo Pocket 4 bundles on Amazon through DJI’s official store that cost $870. The camera by itself was listed for 479 euros, or $565 U.S. at launch. There may still be ways to get DJI’s latest gimbal-mounted camera without having to purchase one overseas, but we can’t guarantee they’ll be cheap. It’s all to say that the “Pro”-level vlogging cams, from DJI and Insta360 alike, are likely going to demand a pretty penny, no matter what.
