The LG 360 Camera comes at a time when 360 photos and videos are becoming fairly popular within social media outlets. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all support these new formats and photographers are just finding out the potential for them. So when I was given the LG 360 Cam from LG Canada, I knew I had to take it for a spin during one of my many outings.
This post will cover 360 photos taken with the LG 360 Cam. I’ll write another post when I have done a few more 360 videos with the LG 360 Cam.
The LG 360 Cam is essentially a self enclosed camera in a bubble gum-sized package with a 180 lens built on either side. There’s one single button that allows you to take a photo with a single click, or start a video with a slightly longer press of the button. It connects to your LG G5 phone, or iOS device via Blootooth and local wifi. Alternatively, you can control the camera via the 360 Cam app.
It’s worth noting that to use the LG 360 Cam, you’ll need a micro SD card, which isn’t included in the package. Without one inside the camera, you won’t be able to use it. The camera also requires a wifi and bluetooth connection to your LG G5 or iOS device. One finicky part about the wifi that’s required by the phone and 360 Cam is that if your 360 Cam is on, you won’t be able to automatically connect to any other wifi on your phone. It’s an odd setup but as soon as you turn off the 360 Cam, you’ll be able to automatically reconnect to your usual wifi hotspots again.
The cover of the 360 Cam acts as a holder by inverting and connecting to the base of the camera itself. It’s handy and eliminates the need to carry the cover separately, but on my first outing with the camera, I had completely forgotten about this, hence seeing my hand so close in the 360 image.
Here’s a 360 photo taken on the streets surrounding Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto. I was holding the 360 Cam with my hands when I took this shot, so my hands are quite visible if you pan down in the photo. I’ve since discovered that even better than using the cover, a selfie stick does a great job of removing my hands from that position and makes the photo much cleaner.
The camera itself is relatively simple. It does its job taking 180 photos and shines in particular during the day. Chroma noise does start to enter when the light falls so while it’s still possible to enjoy 360 degrees in low-light, I would recommend using it during the day.
Here’s a 360 photo taken shortly after sunset. While it wasn’t completely dark yet, you can see there’s quite a bit of noise present in the shadow areas of the photo. The low light ability of this camera is unfortunately not as good as I’ve seen from other competing cameras, like the Ricoh Theta S.
The stitching of the two 180 degree photos isn’t perfect, with some stitching signs visible throughout—particularly through solid colours like the sky. It’s not too much of a distraction, however, so I don’t mind this imperfection.
Camera Roll
To view the 360 photos and videos that you’ve taken with your camera, the 360 Cam needs to be connected to your phone. When connected, you can go to the Gallery to view all of your media on the 360 Cam. From here, you have the choice of deleting, sharing, or downloading the photo or video to your LG G5 or iOS device.
Once you’ve downloaded your 360 photos and videos to your device, selecting the My device option will show you all the media you have on your LG G5 or iOS device. You can then share on any of your social media outlets.
360 Photos Viewed in Camera Roll
When you’re viewing 360 photos in Android’s Camera Roll, you can pan the phone around to view all around the image. It’s a great way to create different angles and perspectives from the shot. In the photo below, tilting my phone while viewing the 360 phone gave this effect. You can see my finger is right by the lens since this is before I discovered the selfie stick method.
And here’s one where I tilted the phone, giving a great angle to a landscape. This almost seems like it was taken with a fisheye lens! This photo was taken with the selfie stick so you can see my finger is nowhere to be found in the image. In fact, you can’t even tell that I’m holding anything at all.
If you choose to view the photo regularly, then you’ll just get this plain view that has a lot of distortion.
Or if you really stretch things out, you can be on top of the world.
Here’s the 360 view of the farmer’s market, where all of these screen captures were taken from.
Time Lapse on the LG 360 Cam
If you’ve updated the firmware on the 360 Cam after July 2016, LG added the ability to capture time lapse photos. You should have a new icon in the Mode menu when you’re in the camera mode.
Select the new icon and you’ll get the current interval setting. To change it, simply select the option and choose a different interval for your time lapse.
It’s a great feature that I’m super happy about. The camera will continuously take photos at the interval that you specify until you tell it to stop. You then take all the sequenced images that are in your Gallery, and import them into a third party program that will create your time-lapse movie for you. I have yet to use this, but I look forward to using this feature soon. Perhaps that will be another post as well!
Overall I’d say the LG 360 Cam offers a lot of fun in such a compact camera body. The photos that come out of it may not be high quality images similar to what you get from a dSLR, but it serves its purpose for a 360 image and it can be lots of fun to view them afterwards. The addition of a time lapse feature only makes this camera even better.
Have you played with the LG 360 Cam yet? Do you have another 360 camera with similar features? Do tell in the comments below!