u/Unlucky_Coach_6183

After using the Insta360 X5 for two months and the original Osmo 360 for about a year, I’ve come to the conclusion that last-gen 360 cameras are basically only good for one thing: reframing flat video. The 8K 360 video quality is nowhere near sharp enough to be immersive in a VR headset.

Photo mode on previous hardware was equally frustrating for different reasons:

• X5: High-res HDR panos took around 10 seconds to capture and dozens of seconds to process, making it painful for spontaneous shooting.
• Osmo 360 (Gen 1): The 120MP mode lacked HDR completely. In a 360 scene where harsh dynamic range is inevitable, highlights were always blown and shadows crushed. On top of that, the compression was ridiculously aggressive, killing the actual detail.

With the current gen (X6 / Osmo 360 Gen 2), it looks like 8K video hasn't fundamentally changed without higher bitrates or real supersampling. But the photo specs caught my eye—both now push 120MP HDR stills (assuming X6 has it like before) and 16K timelapses.

My primary use cases for these cameras aren't action vlogging, but:

1. Viewing high-res 360 stills in VR
2. Interval capture on long road trips
3. Gathering clean image datasets for Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)

Has anyone had hands-on time to test the real-world photo quality, dynamic range, and processing times between the X6 and Osmo 360 Gen 2? Is the 120MP actually usable this time around without insane compression or workflow bottlenecks? This is pretty much the sole deciding factor for whether I upgrade and which one I pick.

I honestly don’t even know whether to laugh or cry at this point.

Ever since the original Osmo 360 launched a year ago, the community and forums have been practically begging DJI for one very specific, very reasonable firmware update: supporting HDR mode for 120MP pano photos, or at the very least, unlocking RAW (DNG) for 120MP stills.

Everyone was convinced this would arrive in a future update because the hardware was clearly capable of it, and it felt like an obvious missing software feature at launch. People waited. Months went by. Threads were bumped. DJI reps gave the usual "I've forwarded your feedback to the R&D team" canned response.

Fast forward to today: Osmo 360 2 is announced.

And guess what? 120MP HDR is finally here! Except it’s locked behind a brand new $400+ camera, serving as one of the very few, minuscule "upgrades" on the Gen 2 spec sheet.

Are you serious, DJI?

Instead of supporting early adopters who bought into your first-gen ecosystem with a basic software patch, you literally held back basic photo processing capabilities just so you'd have something to put on the Gen 2 marketing slide.

This isn't hardware limitation; this is pure, textbook artificial segmentation.

I love DJI’s hardware quality, but this practice of treating software-level fixes as "next-gen exclusive features" is getting ridiculous.

Anyone else feeling completely disrespected as a Gen 1 buyer?