Insta360 put its new flagship on sale on 12 August. The X6 follows last year's X5 and the company is calling it the biggest jump the X series has made. It starts at US$699.99 from Insta360's own store, Amazon and the usual camera retailers, which is US$150 more than the X5 asked at launch.

The case for the money

The sensors do the heavy lifting. Insta360 has fitted two custom Sony 1/1.1 inch square sensors, which it says add up to 1-inch equivalent 360 imaging, a third more sensor area than the X5 and around four times the light per frame. Those are the company's own comparisons. Bigger sensors matter more on a 360 camera than almost anywhere else though, because tiny sensors are why most 360 footage falls apart the moment the sun goes down.

The feature that will actually move units is the mode switching. The X6 shoots full 360 at 8K50fps, tracks a subject into flat 4K with no editing step, or drops to a single lens and behaves like a standard action camera at 5K60 with a field of view up to 170 degrees. One body covering the 360 rig, the tracking gimbal and the action cam is a real pitch for anyone filming family life and content out of the same bag.

The editing does itself, supposedly

Plug the X6 in to charge and Insta360's new AI Director goes through the footage on its own, builds a highlight edit and pushes finished clips to the app. Auto Edit 2.0 does a one-tap version when you want a say in it. Insta360 says the model behind all this was trained on more than 10,000 hours of footage. Whether the edits are actually good is something a press release cannot tell you, and I have not tested it.

The rest of the sheet

There is a 2.32 inch OLED screen rated at 1200 nits, a 2600mAh battery Insta360 puts at 140 minutes of 8K30 recording with a fast charge to 80 per cent in 24 minutes, and 47GB of usable storage built in, so a forgotten SD card no longer ends the day. The replaceable lens design carries over from the X5, now five times more scratch-resistant and 60 per cent cheaper to swap by the company's numbers, and the camera is waterproof to 20 metres without a case.

Insta360 has not published a headline Australian price in its launch material, and I have not confirmed a firm AUD figure, so work off the US$699.99 starting price and check the local store at checkout.

One more thing worth knowing before you spend: DJI launched its direct rival, the Osmo 360 II, one day later. The short version is that DJI's camera is China-only for now, and the longer version is in my next story.