Gadgetory

we're at the beginning of a consumer content revolution where inexpensive action camera hardware can produce high quality content and we're entering the second wave of proper 360 degree photo and video solutions I'm Juan Carlos bag now for pocket now and here's a brief look at Samsung's gear 360 camera brought to you by D brand now Samsung reps have been aggressively quick to point out that everything we're playing with is pre-release and the gear 360 is still in a pretty raw state we've seen a bunch of different solutions for producing 360 degree content at the most basic we have panorama photos then Google introduced photo spheres in the stock Android camera app though I've always found this photo stitching to be a bit cumbersome other manufacturers have played with fisheye lenses to produce panorama pics that can be stretched or adjusted to create single click panorama photos and videos but single lens cameras can only create a strip of footage or a Half Dome a video to get a full sphere you need at least two lenses and two sensors stapled together and that's what we get with the gear 360 this ball of the camera is bigger in person than what the hardware looks like in press photos each lens has around a 195 degree field of view so even though this is a thicker body than other solutions there's still plenty of overlap to stitch the two pieces together the camera will ship with a little grip that flowers out to give the gear 360 some feet and that handled attaches to provide a standard tripod mount while 360 degree content is the main purpose of this action cam it can be used in single lens mode to produce an extreme wide-angle shot for those times you want to stay behind the camera and focus on a specific subject when using both lenses the gear 360 will deliver 30 megapixel stills and 3840 by 1920 resolution videos slightly lower than UHD resolution this is good to see as resolution gets stretched thin when it's wrapped all around your head we're content with 1080p when all of those pixels are displayed in one rectangle in front of us having used 360 degree cameras which produce HD footage quality degrades quickly when that two megapixel resolution has to capture everything in every direction not just where we're looking images are saved to a local SD card and Samsung reps are estimating that each gigabyte of storage should provide around four minutes of video that's somewhere around a 30 to 40 megabit per second bit like many action cameras the gear 360 can be used on its own blind or it can be paired wirelessly to the galaxy s7 and s7 edge to use the phone as a viewfinder at launch those two phones will be the main focus as Samsung evaluates which older phones are powerful enough to process the images from this camera efficiently and that's where this demo got tricky as I couldn't get the pre-release 360 to consistently pair and preview an image through the app on the s7 after a battery pull and a reset a rep was able to preview an extremely unflattering image of the two of us from a low angle one would hope that after the image is processed for VR viewer we won't be quite so oompa-loompa distorted from the wide-angle lens having used Samsung's mirrorless cameras like the nx30 which has a terrific Android app for live view and file transfer the gear 360s app should be sorted by the time this hardware launches next quarter though we're still waiting to get final confirmation and pricing and availability there's a lot more to cover though once we get a gear 360 in house 2016 could be the year consumers get real VR viewers and the tools to produce their own immersive content so stay tuned for more coverage once we start reviewing accessories like the gear 360 pocket now's MWC 2016 coverage is made possible by D brand manufacturer precision cut vinyl skins for smartphones tablets laptops gaming consoles and more if you're looking to customize the appearance of your device and add a bit of protection and grip check out D brand comm slash MWC or visit the link in the description below and be sure to subscribe to this channel to catch the rest of the team's MWC coverage from barcelona we're getting all kinds of exciting mobility announcements that were sure you're going to enjoy for pocket now i'm juan carlos bag now we can chat me up on Instagram and Twitter as some gadget guy and I will catch you all on the next video I'm flattered great yeah absolutely the worst