GoPro Max 360

amazon GoPro Max 360 reviews

Every new 360 camera that actually comes out promises one of those totally immersive videos. No one has lived up to that promise. We have seen GoPro already before and touted as the savior such a format desperately needed, but the 2017 Fusion-that was GoPro’s first-ever-360 camera-left much to be desired.

Two years later, GoPro took the experience gained from that Fusion and wrapped it up in a smaller, cheaper, and much easier to use, Max. Likewise acts as a hybrid camera, allowing 360 modes or Hero’s mode, when it acts just like a standard GoPro Hero camera, except only at 1080p. Like many other 360 cameras today, Max’s spherical footage can be reframed in the post, allowing you to orient the camera in place and add pan, tilt, and zoom effects.

For GoPro, this is a step in the right direction. But again, Max is graced with the usual 360-format ghosts and hardly budges the segment ahead. The fact is that 360-degree video still doesn’t have a proper tool for serious editing. Max costs $200 less than Fusion, but at $500, it’s more like a toy for early adopters and not a must-have for creative professionals.

The ability to streamline things for GoPro newbies

Clearly, GoPro has put considerable effort into the Max concept in terms of hardware and software. Smaller and lighter than the Fusion, it now can stand up to even the most extreme sports situations where a GoPro camera would see duty. Still, it’s quite a bit heftier than the Hero8 Black.

Yet, remarkably, the GoPro Max comes fitted with a touchscreen built into it to preview footage and also control the camera. Another important addition, similar to Fusion, is the compensating lens design which is said to assist in the precision of piecing together the two hemispheres. Even better, while Fusion requires its separate memory card for each of the cameras, the Max employs a single MicroSD card. Immediate stitching is done in-camera as opposed to a post.

Good news, but again, not like this is news. Cheaper 360 cameras, such as Rylo and Insta360, have been doing this for years: in-camera stitching on a single memory card.

Where GoPro comes into play, however, is its phenomenal mobile application. It’s far beyond what it was back in the days of Fusion and eventually adopts keyframe-based editing to refine 360 content into standard fixed-frame output. Amongst all of the 360 cameras I have used, GoPro’s fine-tuning tools are by far the easiest to use.

You would change the camera angle and field of view at various points along the timeline, and then the app will perform panning, tilting, and zooming at the chosen settings between those two points. You can also select how that animation happens-what Max has that no other camera has-on a linear, easy in/out, or clipping jumps basis.

The GoPro app now makes it a lot easier to edit your Max footage with everyday Hero clips or any other video on your phone’s camera roll. It is a much richer editing experience than the one offered by Rylo or Insta360.

Yet, while the Max controls are by far-the most sensible and economical among any 360 cameras, it does fall short of a couple of features. For starters, GoPro does not afford anything along the lines of automatic subject tracking, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of feature is added later down the line. And on the hardware side, not one of Insta360’s mad accessories comes with a dart-like mount-a mount that tossed the camera into the air for bullet-time effect shooting.

GoPro is generally not aimed at the same consumer category as Max. Unlike other 360 cameras, it has no case for water, and it certainly feels so much more rugged than the Rylo or One X.

Performance and image quality

Max can record spherical video at 5.7K resolution, but that may confuse someone. It may sound like quite a lot of pixels, but these pixels are spread across the entire spherical area. Therefore, the resolution of any individual vantage point within that area will be lower by a very large margin. In fact, wide-angle perspectives will tend to appear the sharpest; however, zooming into and out of the image-only digitally cropped-causes considerable softening.

The Max seems to have a slight advantage over others because it is not so much the strong compression, but he is not perfect either. Don’t have the same details as found in GoPro.

The stitch quality is a sore point of every consumer 360 camera, but the Max isn’t bad. It’s a shame it’s not as good as Fusion’s desktop-based stitch, which is nearly perfect (but ridiculously slow). However, it’s better than the Fusion’s movable stitch by a reasonable margin, although objects close to the camera, suspect your hand, will still be distorted. Furthermore, there might be sudden lens flare when stitching because of differences in light between one lens and the other, resulting in a color shift between the two hemispheres.

On the positive side, the image stabilization-dubbed “HyperSmooth” -is excellent. There is endless scope to reframe a video without throwing away pixels as 360 does, which gives better electronic stabilization than what could even be obtained from a normal fixed perspective camera. Not only does this smooth out your most extreme mountain bike rides, but with hyper lapse videos-what GoPro calls TimeWarp-it also allows them to look incredibly polished.

One of the coolest features of Max is called TimeWarp. It’s essentially TimeWarp clips that you can put together just like standard 360 footage in hyperlapse, zooming, and panning. Pretty cool effect that will most likely leave your audience guessing as to how you did it. The only downside is that what you end up losing by not using the auto hyper lapse speed setting based on camera movement as you’d find in the Hero8 Black means that you’ll have to select such speeds as 5X, 10X, and so on manually.

Excellent audio performance on GoPro

In audio, the Max is praised due to the new spherical microphone system. Dialogs can be heard clearly, even in wind. Audio seemed an afterthought on a 360 camera; so, it is nice to see GoPro making an effort.

The GoPro Max is definitely better than the Fusion, while, however, not really an advancement of the immersive imaging. It has a wonderful user experience packed with so many innovative modes and features; however, it has encountered all the limitations of a 360 camera that we have learned about for centuries. The resolution is simply okay, and stitch quality is also okay.

I did expect much more because, to redeem the 360 concept of the camera, you’d have to introduce at-least 8K resolution. There is little chance that any phone nowadays can store and process that heavy kind of scene. This puts the likes of GoPro in a tricky spot, as they want to provide a seamless mobile experience with the ultimate quality.

For now, 360 is still something of a novelty. It has the potential to create amazing content that looks great on Instagram, but it doesn’t seem to hold the status of revolutionary format.

where can you get a GoPro Max 360 online

GoPro MAX 360 Action Camera – Bundle with 64GB MicroSDXC Card, FotoPro UFO 2 Flexible Tripod, Cleaning Kit: Buy it now