Samsung will finally sell its cutesy 360-degree camera in the US
So what if Asia got it before we did?
It's been half a year since we first met Samsung's charming 360-degree camera, and they're still a little tough to come by. They've available in Korea and Singapore, and Samsung sold them briefly at this year's VidCon to web-video fanatics, but that's it ... for a little longer, anyway. As with all the other new Samsung gear announced today, the Gear 360 will go on sale (online at least) starting August 19th.
Need a quick refresher? The Gear 360 features F/2.0 fish-eye lenses, with a 15-megapixel sensor nestled behind each of them. Each of those cameras can capture 195 degrees worth of stuff in front of them, which can then be stitched together into a single immersive video (at up to 3,840 x 1,920 at 30 frames per second) and shared to the furthest corners of the internet. This adorable little ball-cam can also shoot roughly 30-megapixel stills, if that's more your speed.
The caveat (you knew there had to be one) is that video editing and sharing only work well with recent Samsung smartphones. Unless you own a Galaxy Note 5, Note 7 or any of the GS6 or GS7 models, you're sort of out of luck. Though the camera comes with an activation code for a Windows editing app, it's a decidedly less elegant way of doing things. Oh, and be sure to keep a microSD card handy: There's no internal storage here at all.