The first 5.7K sample from the Yi 360 VR camera has been posted! Check it out! Also, B&H is now accepting preorders!
Here’s the sample, posted by Sami Luo:
OBSERVATIONS
The detail is amazing for a 360 consumer camera, with noticeable improvement compared to 4K. Even with YouTube’s high compression, you can see the difference in the plate numbers and front grills of the cars here (click for full resolution).
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| left: 5K. right: 4K |
You can pixel peep here (click for full resolution):
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| 4K |
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| 5K |
In terms of optics, the sharpness appears excellent, with consistent sharpness almost throughout the field of view, except right at the stitch line.
There seems to be no chromatic aberration or purple fringing whatsoever. See the lights through the windows of this building:
Stitching is not perfect. For nearby objects, the stitching is quite noticeable. You can only do so much about parallax stitching error when lenses are not that close to each other.
There were stitching errors even at farther distances (such as the windows of this building).
It almost seems as if this is purely template-based stitching, although I could be wrong about that. At NAB, Yi representatives said that the Yi 360 VR has optical flow stitching, which should be able to stitch scenes like this, and they said the stitching would not be noticeable. Perhaps this is a limitation of the preproduction software.
Update: A Yi representative said this is a preproduction camera using beta software. The retail product will have better stitching.
The dynamic range is impressive. You can see the detail in the shadow, such as the dark door of this building, while there is also at least some detail in the sky, which retained its color.
On a separate note, I also noticed that the video is not playing back smoothly at full 5K resolution. I have a GTX 1060 6GB, a VR-ready graphics card, but my PC can’t play the video smoothly (the same is true of any other 5K video on YouTube). This is not too surprising, considering that each frame of this video has almost the same resolution as a 360 photo from the Ricoh Theta. In any case, as PC hardware improves, more people will be able to view video of this resolution smoothly.
Notwithstanding these issues, this seems to be the most detailed 360 video sample I’ve seen for a consumer 360 camera, especially at this price range!
PREORDERS NOW OPEN AT B&H PHOTO
In addition, B&H is now accepting preorders! I suggest using a credit card instead of Paypal so your order doesn’t get charged until the order ships (with Paypal, they will charge right away).
Thank you very much to Suso Barral and Andrew Mines for bringing this video to my attention and thanks to Ed Lewis for sharing the info on B&H preorders!
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