So I've received Nauticam's Insta360 X5 underwater housing...

... and the news are good and bad. Like life just can't be simple...

The good news is the sharpness at certain focal length is just awesome. Like miles ahead of a 360 Pro dome. All sample screenshots - the active type is yellow in thumbnails names.

The bad news is the seam. I am hoping that there is some work going on with Insta360 and nauticam which would fix the issue but for now the seam is soooo visible and inaccurate. Basically unusable if the shot includes short - medium distance (and that's where sharpness excels the most).

So it seems the main strength of this product are 180 shots for documentary reasons as long as these shots originate on one of two spheres. Just dont even think of having invisible seam for in between footage.

For like wide angle shots without close subject or in another words infinity shots I would say the results are comparable from what I see. Mind you this is a poorly lit pool so we shall see that results are we going to get from reef shots with abundance of light but it could be similar. So no big difference.

and the bad seam for subject 2m away you can judge yourselves...

And lastly another ugly child is the lamp projection. You can see where my lamp was so do your own caculations as to where the housing was when it projected this

So all in all not what I expected from Nauticam. I expected water contact optics - their solution is their own dry optics in a custom shape glass dome. I expected excellent invisible seam due to 190 claimed angle and the seam is quite visible and even at the distance. And for now I leave aside that ugly dome light projection...

So even though the 180 quality is quite good the question which needs to be asked is why would they release such inferior product for a 360 degrees camera. I was expecting they would put their awsome water contact optics on it and not their own version of dry optics in a glass dome...

This ugly child has quite a potential to tarnish otherwise great reputation so in their shoes I would probably take it off the market and come back with something that works rather than keep selling this inferior product further. What do you think?

Edited 4 hours ago4 hr by RomiK