Insta360 Titan

Written by Editor

June 25, 2019

According to CreatorUp the Insta360 Titan is shipping (BHphotovideo still lists Titan as preorder)

I was able to spend a few minutes with Insta360 Titan at NAB2019. The specs certainly look good, if incremental, improvement over Insta360 Pro2. Just like the evolution of digital still cameras, a number of technologies have to improve together in order to improve the final product, which is head mount displayed video and still footage. Using the evolution of the DSLR to predict the evolution of 360 cameras should give an idea of how things might progress. Camera sensors can already exceed the real time stitching power available in a small camera package, current GPU needs to be improved to handle the 10K footage (existing cutting edge GPU editing workstations still struggle with 8K here in mid 2019) and HMD displays certainly cannot display full 10K. So each of these technologies will need to improve in-step to enable better quality.

So the eternal question is, Does it make sense to upgrade your current 360 camera? The main advantage of Titan is two more sensors, slightly larger sensor and 10bit codec. If you are the type of creator that wants to future proof your projects today in anticipation of editing workflow, and HMD performance improvements, then it makes sense to buy Titan today. Just remember “future proof” will only be short term until HMDs can display “retina” quality footage, sensors can capture that resolution, and GPUs can quickly handle the stitching and editing.

For field photography, note that the Titan is quite a bit larger than the Insta 360 Pro 2. This could be an important consideration if you are backpacking with the Insta360 Titan, or if you gimbal or drone has a maximum weight limitation. This will likely be the main reason I don’t upgrade my Insta360 Pro right away.

Overall I’m hopeful that the VR photography equipment can quickly evolve. But, we know from experience that being at the cutting edge always means a constant equipment churn. I hope that Insta360 will reward their early investors in this medium and provide upgrades to “last year’s model” while providing ever improving product.

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