360 Camera News and Info

CreatorUp posts Qoocam 8K hands-on first look

Kandao Qoocam 8K hands-on first look and tutorial
Kandao Qoocam 8K hands-on first look and tutorial

The first hands-on review for the Qoocam 8K has been posted by CreatorUp!  Check out his video.

Qoocam 8K is the first 8K 360 camera for consumers, and at $589, costs just a fraction of professional 360 cameras with similar resolution.  I got to try it at the launch in Beijing, however, there were many unanswered questions about the actual performance.  After the launch, a few samples trickled out, but questions persisted.

Now, Kandao has just begun shipping the Qoocam 8K, and they’ve lifted the embargo for beta testers, including CreatorUp.  Here is CreatorUp’s video:

Hugh also posted a sample low light DNG8 photo.

Regarding the Qoocam 8K video, Hugh said that straight out of the camera, the detail is just the same as that of the Insta360 One X and GoPro MAX, which he attributed to the built-in sharpening of the MAX and One X. He also said that it had more noise in low light compared to the One X and MAX. These findings are surprising to me, but I’m going to post my own tests.

Speaking of which, I just got a beta unit of the Qoocam 8K last night and have been shooting with it today.  So far it looks quite promising, although my beta unit is missing many features.  I’ll post a first impressions video tomorrow. In the meantime, if you want to go ahead and order the Qoocam 8K, the only place where it is available right now is direct from Kandao (they pulled their listings from Amazon and B&H).

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  • You can always sharpen in post, but you cannot remove oversharpening artifacts. It’s not very cinematic, as the human eye isn’t oversharpened, either. I think that’s what he meant. It’s hard to tell, he only has a beta unit. The reason 8K makes sense is because by the time you reframe it as traditional 2D video, 4K 360 barely gives you HD quality. Yes, preordering was a risk, but I don’t believe the 8K is there for nothing. On the back of your phone you can’t tell, but viewing it on a proper 27″-32″ monitor, we should be able to. Also an Oculus device isn’t super high res, but 10-15 years from now we’ll have better VR glasses to view it on. And no one will use a phone for viewing pictures in the future, it’s a bad habit we have these days. Considering this can shoot RAW, the standard JPEG output is almost irrelevant for the serious shooter, because stills will be captured in RAW. It would be disappointing if the video was not any better than the Insta 360, though. I hope that’s not true. Insta 360 will always be more mainstream, cheaper, smaller, and with cool accessories.

  • when features are missing it is not called a beta version but an alpha version, this means we wont have a fully debugged final product before at least 6 months