Test footage from Samsung’s new Gear 360 is pretty impressive

Remember this little golf ball from Samsung? It’s tiny and one of the most consumer friendly 360-cameras on the market — it even has its own tripod!

Looking sweet is one thing, but what most of  you are concerned with is how it performs when shooting 360-degree video. Wonder no more as Samsung have uploaded several videos demonstrating the shooting and stitching capabilities of their tiny Gear 360.

It’s pretty impressive. The quality isn’t too bad for a device that small and what really shines is how well everything is stitched together — probably due to that overlapping FOV (each lens shoots in 195-degrees). It’s not perfect, as is evident from the little distortion near the skier’s arms but overall its a pretty good effort.

Looking at this second video showing a bunch of ballerinas, the stitching is even better, almost eliminating distortion. The same can be said for the freestyle soccer too, but if you pay attention you can see a dark ring (almost like a black rainbow) around the area where the video overlaps.

To recap, the Gear 360 utilises two 15-megapixel cameras strapped back-to-back. It has the ability to shoot just under UHD quality which is pretty high, plus it takes 30-megapixel still photos. Each lens has an f/2.0 aperture so that should help out with low-light photography.

It is designed to work best with Samsung’s new Galaxy S7 flagships (which you can check out here and here) where the footage would be shot on the Gear 360 then transferred to the smartphone wirelessly to be stitched. No computer necessary.