GoPro Max 360

amazon GoPro Max 360 reviews

Every new 360 camera that hits the market carries the promise of one of those truly immersive videos. No one has fulfilled this promise. We’ve seen GoPro before as the savior the format desperately needed, but the 2017 Fusion, GoPro’s first 360 camera, left much to be desired.

Two years later, GoPro took the lessons learned from the Fusion and bundled them into a smaller, cheaper, and easier-to-use, Max. It’s a hybrid camera that can be used in 360 modes or Hero’s mode, where it works like a standard GoPro Hero camera, albeit only at 1080p. Like many other 360 cameras today, Max’s spherical footage can be reframed in the post, allowing you to directly orient the camera and add pan, tilt, and zoom effects.

This is a step in the right direction for GoPro. However, Max is haunted by the usual ghosts of the 360 ​​format and rarely pushes the segment forward. 360-degree video isn’t ready for serious editing yet. While the Max is $200 cheaper than the Fusion, at $500 it seems like a toy for early adopters, rather than a must-have creative tool.

A streamlined approach for GoPro newbies

It’s clear GoPro has put a lot of thought into Max’s design, both hardware, and software. It’s smaller and lighter than the Fusion, making it more suitable for the extreme sports situations GoPro cameras are used to, but it’s still significantly larger than the Hero8 Black.

Surprisingly, the GoPro Max has a built-in touchscreen that lets you preview footage and control the camera. It also shares Fusion’s compensating lens design, which is said to aid in the precision of piecing the two hemispheres together. Better yet, where Fusion relies on a separate memory card for each camera, the Max has a single MicroSD card. Stitching is now handled in camera as opposed to in a post.

That’s good news, but stitching in-camera onto a single memory card is par for the course. Cheaper 360 cameras, like those from Rylo and Insta360, have been doing that for years.

Where GoPro comes to the fore is its excellent mobile app. It’s far more capable than it was in the days of Fusion and eventually adopts keyframe-based editing to refine 360 ​​content into standard fixed-frame output. GoPro’s fine-tuning tools are by far the easiest of the 360 ​​cameras I’ve used.

You can set the camera angle and field of view at different points in the timeline, and the app will automatically pan, tilt, and zoom between them. Unique to Max, you can also choose how that animation happens, with options for linear, easy in/out, or clipping jumps.

The GoPro app lets you seamlessly edit your Max footage with standard GoPro Hero clips or any video on your phone’s camera roll. It’s a much more complete editing experience than what’s offered by Rylo or Insta360.

However, while Max’s controls are the most sensible and affordable of any 360 camera, it lacks a few features. GoPro doesn’t offer anything in the way of automatic subject tracking, for example, although I wouldn’t be surprised if such a feature was added in the future. On the hardware side, none of the Insta360’s crazy accessories include a dart-like mount that lets you toss the camera into the air for a bullet-time effect.

GoPro is targeting a different customer than Max. Unlike other 360 cameras, it’s waterproof without a case and certainly feels more durable than the Rylo or One X.

Performance and image quality

Max records spherical video at 5.7K resolution, but this number can be confusing. It sounds like a lot of pixels, but those pixels are all spread out over a spherical area, so any single point of view in that area will have a much lower resolution. Wide-angle perspectives will look sharpest, but being able to zoom in and out of the image – where only the digital image is cropped – results in significant softening.

The Max has a slight edge over its competitors because it doesn’t suffer from strong compression, but it’s certainly not perfect. Don’t expect the same level of detail you get from GoPro.

The stitch quality is a sore point of every consumer 360 camera, but the Max isn’t bad. It’s a pity it’s not as good as Fusion’s desktop-based stitch, it’s almost perfect (but unreasonably slow). However, it’s better than the Fusion’s movable stitch by a reasonable margin, although objects close to the camera, such as your hand, will still be distorted. In addition, differences in light from one lens to the next can result in a color shift between the two hemispheres or a sudden lens flare at the suture.

On the plus side, the image stabilization – dubbed “HyperSmooth” – is excellent. 360 allows for infinite scope for a video to be reframed without having to throw away pixels, which provides better electronic stabilization than what you can get with a traditional fixed perspective camera. Not only does this soften your most extreme mountain bike rides, but it also means that hyperlapse videos — what GoPro calls TimeWarp — look incredibly polished.

TimeWarp is one of the coolest features of Max. As with standard 360 footage, you can reconstruct TimeWarp clips to zoom and pan in hyperlapse. It’s a neat effect that will leave the viewer wondering how you did it. Unfortunately, the Max doesn’t have the Hero8 Black’s ability to automatically select the hyperlapse speed based on camera movement, so you’ll have to manually select 5X, 10X, and more.

High-quality GoPro audio

Audio is another area where the Max shines thanks to the new spherical microphone system. Even in windy situations, the dialog comes through clearly. Audio often feels like an afterthought on a 360 camera, so it’s nice to see GoPro make a real effort.

The GoPro Max is a big improvement over the Fusion, but it’s not a huge step forward for immersive imaging. It offers a great user experience with a large number of innovative modes and features but suffers from the same limitations of 360 cameras that we have grasped for years. The resolution is merely passable and the stitch quality is acceptable.

I was hoping for more. To fix the 360-degree format, the camera will need to shoot at 8K resolution or beyond. Efficiently storing and processing that kind of scene may be beyond the capabilities of today’s phones. That puts companies like GoPro, who want to provide a seamless mobile experience with the best quality possible, in a difficult position.

So far, 360 is still a novelty. It can produce some outstanding content that looks good on Instagram, but it doesn’t feel like the revolutionary format we’ve come to expect.

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