Ricoh Theta m15 Point and Shoot 360 Degree Digital Camera – White

Great cameraEasy to use and works great with my gear vr

If you are into 360° photography then this is a brilliant idea but, it is still badly let down by the quality of the images it produces. They are only just a little bit better than the previous model's photos and there's simply no excuse for this in an age when tiny mobile phone cameras can produce fantastic photos. Come on Ricoh! Do something about this and up the resolution of the Theta then you'll have a winning, five-star product on your hands.

Very much a pricey toy and is very easy to use

Great fun to use

Great talking point at parties etc. not very good with low light but taken some nice pictures with it

I have owned the original Theta since launch. The stills quality of the new M15 is identical (i.e pretty poor) but at the new lower price is a slightly less expensive novelty than the original Theta and is a viable compact method of taking low quality panoramas with a single clickHowever, the new video feature is so poorly implemented and so low in quality that it should never have been released in its current form.That's really the end of my review, but because no meaningful specs for the video have ever been published by Ricoh here is a lot of boring technical detail of why the video is so poor.The Theta stills format delivers an equirectangular panorama from the camera at 3584x1792. I was assuming the video feature of the camera would output a similar format at 30fps.Instead, the video format outputs 1920x1080 frames of AVC with the 2 unprocessed incomplete circular images from the 2 lenses side by side at 14.98fps 32Khz PCM audio. The downloadable Theta app on your computer converts this to an h264 mp4 video with Equirectangular images on frames of 1920x960 again at 14.98 fps although the audio has now been reencoded at 44.1KHz AAC. In both cases the data rate is about 1.6MB/sThe compression artefacts are really noticeable , every straight edge is a fuzzy zigzag Because the image is compressed once in the camera then again in the computer after the Equirectangular video is rendered you get double the yuk!What you have to remember is that you will only be viewing about a sixth of this frame size at a time in the viewer, so the quality is only good enough for viewing at 320x240 which at 15fps can only be regarded as acceptable for a low quality toy. It's no wonder that the video frame rate and resolution are missing from the specs.There is a further problem in that the 2 stitched images in the final video are slightly out of sync. This causes break up of fast moving objects at the join between the 2 lensesThe viewer software (the Theta app for computers) does not even optimise the camera geometry as well as it could, leaving straight edges curved. This is just poor software designThe phone app which you need to control the camera has no live preview and can't switch the camera to video mode or control it when it is in in video mode.I attach 6 photos which show pretty clearly the difference between stills and video quality and also how much better the viewer could display the panoramas captured by the camera with a bit of effort on the software side.

As others have said, really great concept but terrible image quality.

While I agree with others that this could be a finer product for the (huge) price, I don't think it's a particularly bad product to deride. Yes, it could (should, even) be snapping at HD resolution or more, but I'm pretty sure that point-and-shoot panoramic technology isn't cheap from any company at the moment - I'm deliberately saying point and shoot to differentiate from the manual stitching that can be done on smartphones.As a Windows Phone user I'd have liked an app for remote shooting (but as a WP user there's much apps I lack) but I do hear that it's coming, so kudos for paying attention to a niche audience. You're fine on iOS/Android.Images are easy to share using the dedicated site, and editing is very easy in most popular applications (I favour Paint Shop Pro), you just have to save in the same format and not modify height and width, else you'll get a still that cannot be viewed in 360 viewers. Editing is almost essential if you're doing handheld use to avoid your thumb tumouring images!I have to admit, though, unless you have a super enthusiasm for 360 photo-taking you're going to get bored of this easily. Apart from contributing to street-view images and making online museums of places you're allowed to shoot in, you won't be using it very much, I don't think.While image quality is generally quite reasonable it doesn't seem so when you're in video mode. And for the price you'd expect a metal tripod hole rather than a plastic one.Very much a pricey toy in some respects, of a beta type. We'll see this technology sometime in the future in phones and at a higher quality. It's just, if you can't wait and don't mind some issues, go for it.It is very easy to use, though, you know what to do without any real investigation.