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Your Drone Can Fly First, SHOOT LATER with Insta360 Sphere

Insta360 Sphere lets you Fly First, Shoot Later

How would you like to be able to focus on flying your drone and then magically compose the shot after the fact?  Insta360 Sphere lets you do exactly that.

Insta360 Sphere is a 360 camera for your DJI Mavic Air 2 or Air 2S that turns your drone into an “invisible” 360 drone.

If this looks familiar, that’s because it is a similar concept to the Insta360 One R Aerial Mod, which was a 360 camera for the Mavic Pro and Mavic 2 Pro.

Insta360 Sphere Features

  1. Fly First, Shoot Later.  With Insta360 Sphere, you can focus on flying and compose the shot at your leisure, choosing any angle you want, or even showing multiple angles at the same time.
  2. Invisible drone.  When you use the Sphere, the drone will appear invisible in the video.  This lets you reframe the view in any direction without the drone blocking the view.
  3. Flowstate Stabilization.  Insta360 Sphere uses the latest version of Flowstate, which makes your video appear smooth and vibration-free.
  4. Shot Labs.  Add special effects instantly with Shot Labs in the Insta360 app.
  5. No jello.  With some 360 drones, including the Mavic with Aerial Mod, footage suffered from jello.  With Insta360 Sphere, it appears there is no jello when flown with the Air 2S.
  6. GPS.  The Insta360 Sphere is designed not to interfere with your Mavic’s GPS reception
  7. Protective Lens.  Insta360 Sphere includes replaceable protective lenses to avoid scratching your lenses.
  8. Landing pad.   Insta360 Sphere includes a landing pad so that your Air 2 or Air 2S can land safely.
  9. Capture 360 photos.  You can capture fully spherical 360 photos — even of moving subjects.
  10. Shoot 360 videos.  Instead of reframing the video, you can upload your video as a 360 video, which lets your audience swipe their screen or look around it with a VR headset.

Is it hard to land?

One issue with 360 drones is the landing.  The lenses are above and below the drone, so there’s a risk of scratching the lens.  Fortunately, Insta360 has designed the Sphere to make it easy to land.

Price and availability

Insta360 Sphere is available direct from Insta360 for $429.  Please note it only works with the DJI Mavic Air 2 or Air 2S.  Insta360 sent me a unit for review, and I look forward to sharing test results with you as soon as possible.  In the meantime, you can check out other invisible drones here.

About the author

Mic Ty

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  • What about dji mini 3 pro or mini 2? Or mavic 3? Any info about an adapted bracket?
    Mini would be good due to its weight in the EU and probably US toi. I mean of course that with the camera it’s over 250g, but it remains kind of a grey zone, as long as nothing bad happens.
    Mavic 3 – just because it would broaden a lot its potential customers, and myself I own a mavic 3 and it would make extremely little sense to buy an air2 just to have an invisible drone. Either buy a mini or use the mavic 3. Maybe you could forward the question to Insta?

    • Great questions Michael. I’ve requested insta360 to make brackets for Mavic 3 and Mini 3 Pro.

          • Hi Wayne. Jello is a problem that occurs in videos that were shot with a rolling shutter, including most consumer cameras. When there is vibration, you’ll see vertical lines that look wavy. You can search youtube for examples of jello vibration.

  • why is no one asking about how it lands ? from the 1st video, it takes off while resting on the 360 lens cover !!! 🙁

  • As this is finally NOT blocking the GPS receiver on the drone, this could be really great! A bit sad that the resolution for photos is still 6K horizontally instead of 8K, but that gives reasons for a new version in the next years :).

  • It would be nice if they’d make brackets for drone brands that don’t have geofencing like Autel. The only place you can fly a DJI drone nowadays is the middle of nowhere which makes these promo videos total BS.