Ricoh
Ricoh THETA X
Ricoh has been making 360 cameras longer than anyone else here and aims them somewhere else entirely: real-estate tours, insurance surveys and construction documentation, not helmets. The THETA X reflects that — 60 MP spherical stills with the best stitch quality in the category, built-in GPS to tag where each shot was taken, a swappable DB-110 battery so a surveyor can work all day, and a 2.25-inch touchscreen for checking frames on site. It is also not an action camera in any meaningful sense. There is no waterproof rating, nothing mounts to it but a tripod thread, it is rated only to 0 °C, and 5.7K30 video is a secondary feature rather than the point. If you want one camera for both a ski trip and a property listing, this is the wrong half of that pair.
Sensor area against the rest of the catalogue
Derived from the standard optical-format table rather than copied off a spec sheet, because makers print a fraction that hides it. The table and the arithmetic.
What a reframed clip is worth
This camera records 5,760 px across a full 360°. A normal 16:9 clip pulled out of it uses only the slice its field of view covers, so at a typical 80° reframe the usable width is about 1,280 px — roughly 1.3K.
5,760 × (80 ÷ 360) = 1,280 px
An estimate. Stitching, supersampling and the projection move it by a few per cent either way. How this works.
Specifications
Features
- ●60 MP spherical stills with 11K output
- ●Stitch line hard to find in daylight
- ●Built-in GPS for geotagged capture
- ●Swappable DB-110 battery
- ●2.25-inch touchscreen
- ●46 GB internal storage plus microSD
- ●5.7K30 spherical video
Strengths
- +60 MP spherical stills with the cleanest stitch line of any camera here
- +The only 360 camera in the catalogue with a user-swappable battery pack
- +Built-in GPS tags every capture, which is the point for survey work
- +46 GB internal plus a microSD slot
Drawbacks
- −No waterproof rating at all, and rated only to 0 °C
- −Nothing mounts to it but a 1/4-20 thread — no helmet or chest rigs
- −1/2-inch sensors and a 2022 processor make video its weakest side
- −Ricoh publishes neither a bitrate nor a video runtime figure
- −Around $699 for less video capability than a $399 X4 Air
- −Ricoh's app and desktop tools are built for property work, not for editing action footage
The strengths and drawbacks above are drawn from the manufacturer’s specifications and published reviews. No body of owner reports for this camera has been read, so nothing here claims to speak for its owners.
What owners say
No owner discussion has been collected for the Ricoh THETA X yet. The pros and cons above come from the manufacturer’s specifications and published reviews. Rather than fill this space with invented sentiment, it stays empty until there is something real to put in it.
Ricoh THETA X, head to head
Cameras people look at alongside it
More from Ricoh →
Ricoh
Ricoh THETA Z1 51GB
Dual one-inch sensors and a selectable aperture — f/2.1, f/3.5 or f/5.6 — are things no other 360 camera here has, and they are the reason this 2021 camera still sells for a thousand dollars. It is a stills instrument: 23 MP spherical RAW files out of sensors more than twice the area per lens of an Insta360 X6's, which is what professional virtual-tour shooters buy it for, and the selectable aperture is how they control depth of field and diffraction in an interior. Everything else about it is dated and deliberately so. Video caps at 4K30, storage is 51 GB fixed with no card slot, there is no screen beyond a small status OLED, and there is no waterproofing. As an action camera it makes no sense; as the highest-image-quality one-shot 360 stills camera on sale, it is still unmatched.
Insta360
Insta360 X6
Two things separate this from every other 360 camera on sale. It shoots 8K at 50 fps rather than 30, which is what makes reframed slow motion possible instead of theoretical; and it is the only one that publishes a colour bit depth at all — 10-bit, with I-Log and in-camera Dolby Vision. The 2600 mAh Xtreme battery is rated at 140 minutes of 8K30, more than double what the GoPro MAX2 claims, and 20 m of bare waterproofing is four times MAX2's. A note on the sensors: Insta360 markets these as one-inch, and the spec sheet says 1/1.1-inch, which on the standard optical-format table works out around 92 mm² per lens rather than a true one-inch's 116. That is still the largest per-lens area in the 360 class, and it is why the low-light gap to the X5 is as visible as it is.
GoPro
GoPro MAX2
Six years after the first MAX, GoPro finally shipped a successor, and the twist-off lens covers are the headline that matters. Every 360 camera lives or dies on scratched glass — the lenses bulge out past the body by design and there is no guarding them properly — and the MAX2 is the first one where replacing them is a field job rather than a service ticket. Around that sits true 8K spherical at 30 fps with 10-bit colour, a 300 Mbps ceiling that is the highest in the category, GP-Log for grading, and a six-microphone array. It is also the only 360 camera with built-in GPS. The two compromises are real: 5 m of bare waterproofing is the shallowest of any current 360 camera, and 66 minutes at 8K30 is less than half what the Insta360 X6 claims.