Ricoh 360 Degree camera THETA X, High resolution image

I’ve used several 360 cameras including a Theta Z1, Theta S, Xiaomi Misphere / Madventure, Trisio Lite 2 and I often use a mirrorless setup on a pano head. For my purposes at least, I think it comes down to two ways to go about taking 360 photos depending on your needs at the time:

For the highest image quality and resolution: mirrorless or DSLR on a pano head. This gets the best end result by far but needs bulky equipment, additional software (at least PTGui, but probably also some good image editing software), and takes by far the longest time to get to that result.

For the fastest workflow: one-shot 360 camera. This is always quicker than a pano head but the image quality and resolution aren’t as good. Some 360 cameras have a faster workflow than others, both while shooting and afterwards while stitching / editing.

So the trade-off is image quality vs time. When I want the best image I’ll use my mirrorless camera and pano head, accepting that it takes a lot longer. When I need to be quick and I can accept a certain reduction in image quality / resolution, a one-shot 360 camera is the way to go. Therefore the main considerations for me when I use a 360 camera are:

Speed: how quickly can I go from taking it out of my bag to having a fully stitched and edited image?

Quality: I know it’s not going to be as good as a pano head, but how close can it get?

So that’s set the scene for how I see 360 cameras generally. Prior to getting the Theta X I was using the Theta Z1 and Trisio Lite 2. I wanted to like the Theta Z1 because it has a lot of good points but I found all the manual steps in the workflow (especially when using the Dual Fisheye Raw plugin) to be tedious and it made me think I might as well be using my mirrorless camera. The Trisio Lite 2 is excellent and very quick, but it struggles sometimes in very difficult mixed lighting conditions. Side note – if you’re considering the Trisio it’s well worth a try. Straight from the camera I prefer its images to those from the Z1.

On to the Theta X (finally!)

The first thing I did was to take an image in mixed lighting (dark interior, bright exterior through windows) with the default settings. The result was underwhelming to say the least. Blown highlights, very noisy, just not usable.

Then I got to work changing some settings and things improved dramatically. Here are my settings:

ISO sensitivity upper limit: 100 (assuming no movement in the scene or bright ambient light, but keep it as low as possible).

Self-timer: 10 sec unless you trigger it remotely from a phone or TR-1 remote shutter. This allows time for the camera and monopod to settle down after pressing the shutter button while you go and hide.

CT Settings (CT is Colour Temperature): Off unless you want to manually specify the white balance in Kelvin. There’s no Auto white balance if this is on. Auto WB (when CT Settings is off) works well.

Image size: 11K. It takes slightly longer but is worth it.

Option setting: HDR rendering.

With these options set the results are much more impressive. The dynamic range is huge and taking a similar shot to the one described above gives a well exposed view of the sunny outdoors through the windows simultaneously with a well exposed view of the relatively dark interior, all with no obvious HDR artifacts and without looking “false” as HDR shots can sometimes be. The colours are accurate and realistic. If I’m being picky I’d say it struggles *slightly* with bright red objects more than the other colours, but that seems to common to several 360 cameras. There’s much less chromatic aberration than the Z1 (but then it’s really bad on the Z1!). It’s not totally absent, with a few pruple fringes around high contrast edges, but it’s not too distracting and should be easy enough to remove with an image editor if required.

The 60 megapixel resolution sadly doesn’t count for much. I was hoping for more detail and ability to zoom into the images but it’s really no better in terms of resolution than the Trisio Lite 2 which has approximately half the megapixel count. My mirrorless setup produces images that are about 96 megapixels and they have FAR more detail, allowing you to zoom in quite a way. It almost looks like the 60MP is upscaled from a lower resolution.

However as an overall image, as long as you don’t zoom in too much, it stacks up very well and gives a satisfyingly accurate image straight from the camera. Although there’s no RAW support you can get away with bit of light editing and it goes a long way. A bit of noise reduction and sharpening gets you to a very pleasing image with little effort. They’re absolutely acceptable for a virtual tour embedded in a web page and look great viewed at mobile phone screen size. If i view them full screen on my ultrawide monitor I start to see the lack of resolution, but to be fair that’s probably not how most people will view these photos.

Compared the the Theta Z1 the workflow is massively quicker. It’s also quicker than the Trisio, which is already pretty quick. With the Theta X, you press the shutter and within a couple of seconds you have a stitched image on your phone ready for use, or maybe for a bit of editing first if you’re a perfectionist like me. There’s no RAW image support so you can’t expect to be doing the same sort of editing you’d do with the Z1, but for me that’s missing the point of a one-shot 360 camera. If I wanted to take that long over it I’d be using my pano head. I want the image to be quick, low effort and of consistent, acceptable quality. And that’s what you get from the Theta X.

The images are very consistent, even in very challenging lighting conditions. I tested it in a very difficult location that the Trisio Lite 2 has struggled with in the past. Very bright artificial lights in an otherwise dark, large space. To be fair the Trisio did a reasonably good job but the Theta X coped better. Both are amazing at finding light where there isn’t much, but the Theta X’s images look more reaslitic and more detailed while the Trisio blew the highlights more. In more typical situations they look pretty comparable, but the Trisio has a tendency to look a bit desaturated and hazy, especially around bright parts of the image, where the Theta X is more balanced. When speed is a concern, consistency is important because it means less editing to get to usable images.

The touch screen is great. It makes it absolutely practical to shoot without connecting to a phone because you can change settings easily and preview your results right on the camera. It also has the benefit of extending the battery life if you turn WiFi off. Swappable batteries are fantastic, as is the micro SD card slot, but if you’ve read this far you already knew that 🙂 It’s a great design and a real step up from previous Theta cameras in that respect.

One thing I’d like to see improved is the softness in the stitch line, the “seam” where the two hemispherical images are stitched together. It can be quite noticeably blurry along that line in some shots so you have to think carefully about which way you orient the camera. The Trisio Lite 2 is actually better at this. I hope it’s something that can be improved with a firmware update.

The built in time shift shooting mode works well and because it’s built in it also works with the TR-1 remote shutter (support for which is also built-in), unlike the Z1. It might seem unnecessary to trigger the shutter using a remote if you’re using time shift and therefore standing right by the camera, but it can help to reduce camera vibrations and so you can reduce the length of the timer, saving valuable seconds. When you shoot a lot of 360 photos, every second wasted starts to feel like an eternity! I’ve noticed that the images from the two lenses can look slightly different, causing a visible seam when using time shift, which doesn’t happen in normal shooting mode. Maybe it’s just down to the light changing slightly in the few seconds between the shots but whatever the reason it can be noticeable, although not dramatically so. If you don’t know what time shift is, it takes the photos from the two lenses a few seconds apart so you have time to move from one side of the camera to the other, effectively making you invisible. It’s a really useful feature that means you don’t need to hide from the camera for every shot.

So in summary it’s growing on me. It’s early days but so far I’m liking the results. The lack of RAW support doesn’t bother me because the JPEGs are good enough quality, and as I say when I’m using it I don’t want to spend ages editing, but I can accept that others might find that to be more of a concern and if so then the Z1 might be a better choice.

Suffice to say I have now sold my Z1.

Sorry it’s such a long review! I wanted to get all my thoughts down in case it helps someone make a decision.