Vuze XR 3D VR & 360 Camera Starter Kit

Stabilization for 360 videos is a crapshoot compared to Insta360 onex. The one-x seems to produce gimbal like stabilization, but this seems to produce jittery and artifact filled stabilization. Maybe I am being overly critical but vuze’s software stabilization just doesn’t compare.

VR180 stabilization is just as bad, however for a consumer camera I’m not sure I have much else to compare this to at this price point. Basically unless you mount on a tripod you don’t want to be filming VR180.

360 videos you can somewhat get away with mediocre stabilization, but with vr180 the footage needs to be smooth or else it will be blurry in a headset. Now, I am confident that the vuze team is working on better stabilization, but it is just not there yet in their software/firmware.

Video quality: there’s sometimes a lot more noise than I would like when shooting in 4k60fps. I think this too is a software issue, as they just need to add in better noise filtering algorithms. You still can’t shoot in raw mode. This camera uses the same image sensors as the Pixel 1 smartphone, so I expect the quality to be pretty good (the original pixel can shoot some amazing videos).

Stitching of 360 videos: mediocre. It isn’t bad, but you can DEFINITELY see the stitch lines, and it definitely misaligns sometimes. You can somewhat adjust in post using vuze studio, but it isn’t very user friendly.

3D and 360 photo quality: “18MP” means nothing here. The photo quality is crap when viewed in a VR headset. Do not buy for taking 360 or 3D180 photos. I don’t understand why the photo quality is comparatively worse: perhaps because it compresses the photos on the camera itself, no raw mode. If we could tweak the quality of the compression that would be good.

TLDR: stabilization is not good, and one of the major reasons I will return this camera. Software/firmware is still immature compared to other product offerings in the same class. Hardware is top notch for this price range, but without the software support it won’t reach its full potential. This feels like a rushed product software wise, and it needs more time in the oven. If you absolutely need to take 5.7k VR videos, this is your only option in this price range and hardware wise stands above everything else. But if I were you I would wait a good 6 months for the Vuze team to perfect the software/firmware. If you’re a prosumer and edit in Adobe CC, then you’ll get by ok on this. But if you’re like me and just want a way to quickly share VR, this is not very user friendly.