Amazon Fire TV stick Samsung Gear 360

36 360-degree camera for a wider ou outlook on life Fu Full stream ahead with internet TV on a stick

Samsung’s second attempt at a 360-degree camera is tiny – just big enough to grip firmly in your hand. Making it stand upright unattended is harder, so a little rubber ring is provided to steady it, which feels a bit silly. The rechargeable battery is supposed to last 2-3 hours, and it got us through an evening of off-and-on shooting, but no charger is supplied, only a USB Type-c cable to plug into an existing power adapter. Like a phone camera, the Gear 360 sets everything automatically, so the only thing to worry about is low light. You can increase the sensitivity ( ISO) to capture more in shadow, but things get very grainy. If you’re not sure when something is going to happen, you can set the camera to record in loop mode: when the storage fills up it’ll erase from the beginning, keeping the latest footage, until you turn it off. The twin cameras each shoot at greater than Full HD (1920x1080-pixel) resolution, resulting in 4K video files. Remember that’s across the whole 360-degree scene, so when viewed on a big screen it still looks a bit fuzzy. Even so, it’s impressive, and better than we’ve seen before. You can also take 15- megapixel stills. The stitching of the images is pretty seamless, although you’ll occasionally spot the joins.

Annoyingly, the Gear 360 only pairs with recent Samsung and Apple phones, and not all features are supported on Apple. For example, the Live Broadcast tool, which streams Full HD video to the internet, only works with Samsung models running Android 7 (Nougat).

The Gear 360 can be used by itself, and you can download the resulting images to a PC or Mac for processing and sharing, but without a phone you’d have no preview of what you’re shooting. A few settings can only be made in the app, not on the camera itself, which only has a tiny LCD status display.

Offering much better quality than the £200 LG 360 Cam (see our review, Issue 482), the Gear 360 is good value, although we’re starting to see the LG model heavily discounted. Ricoh’s £299 Theta S (see Issue 467) needs to up its game – it takes sharper stills, but its Full HD video resolution and non-expandable 8GB storage can’t compete.

Greatqualityand seamless results– justa shameitdoesn’tsupport moredevices

VERDICT: There’s little to choose between this and the rival Seagate drive, but the WD Blue edges it

★★★★★

ALTERNATIVE: Seagate Barracuda 4TB £104 Like the WD Blue, this isn’t meant for continuous heavy use but performs well for the money