Upcoming Insta360 X4 8K, in less than one hour, here?

[kye]

13 hours ago, gt3rs said:

- operations and UI are snappier than previous models (other than stopping the recording that takes a lot, not sure why)

This might be a blessing-in-disguise, as a lot of cameras actually lose the last few seconds of footage before you hit stop. So it might be compensating for that and making sure no clips are cut short.

[eatstoomuchjam]

Ouch.  I love the cameras that I have from them, but they're going to need to clean up this shady garbage if they want my continued business.  It's not that hard to spot the shills, regardless of sponsorship disclosures, but I still don't want to patronize somebody who is trying to hide it...  partly because it's insulting to the intelligence to think that somebody with a day 1 video doesn't have a relationship with the company.

I'll also note that iphonedo is hardly innocent in this regard as well.  While his agreements with companies like DJI don't specifically remove his editorial independence, he also knows that if he's too critical of their products, the sponsor dollars will dry up.  One can definitely see that he tries harder to be positive in his reviews of their gear than he tried, for instance, with the Karma drone that he mentioned.  It's not a bad quality, necessarily, but just another data point to keep in mind when watching any of the reviews on his channel.
 

 

[kye]

54 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

somebody with a day 1 video doesn't have a relationship with the company

Yeah, I assume that too.  

55 minutes ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

While his agreements with companies like DJI don't specifically remove his editorial independence, he also knows that if he's too critical of their products, the sponsor dollars will dry up.

I've always been conscious of this too.  The only potentially impartial reviews are when the person buys it anonymously like any member of the public would, gets it the same time it ships to everyone else, then they put it through their paces.

The other issue with "reviews" that aren't long-term reviews is that the person hasn't had the product for long enough to really test it.  People like Gerald might know what shortcomings to look for and actively go looking for them, but no-one can test reliability in less than a week.  

I find the same issues with product reviews on Amazon etc - they are essentially first-impression reviews.

[gt3rs]

Nothing really new and I'm sure is not just insta... but is indeed bad. They produced good stuff no need of these bad behaviors.
The good news is that the more and more of this comes out and hopefully people will learn to be very skeptical about those reviewers....

I normally just skim true and look at the video to get an idea. Very fishy are also the comparison gopro vs insta and so on..... 

I wish some will simply create some good footage and do a bts and not bla bla gamechanger, why I switch, best ever, is so much better than camera b and worst of all with a stupid face on the thumbnail.

This is the only one that I really liked, sponsored yes, but starts with really good footage and goes in to how he did it. Still a big Ad, but much better than all these pseudos expert reivewers crap
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHT27gW91kU

 

 

[eatstoomuchjam]

If you just want footage with no commentary, markr041 who is a user here has a YouTube channel and he tends to try a pretty decent number of the cameras that come out.  They're usually decently shot and I don't think I've ever even seen one where he talked about the camera (or even showed his face).  😃

[ac6000cw]

The situation with review content being affected by commercial interests is nothing new in the slightest...

Many years ago I was asked if I was interested in doing a product review for a now long-gone print magazine. I tried to be as fair as possible when I wrote it, but thought the product had some usability/compatibility issues that needing fixing. The version of the review printed in the magazine had some of my criticism watered-down, I assume partly because advertising revenue related to the product was important to the finances of the magazine.

I only did a couple of reviews for the magazine in the end, mostly because the amount they paid for them wasn't much in relation the work involved in testing a product properly (and I wasn't interested in doing quicker, more superficial reviews).

[kye]

2 minutes ago, ac6000cw said:

The situation with review content being affected by commercial interests is nothing new in the slightest...

Many years ago I was asked if I was interested in doing a product review for a now long-gone print magazine.

I watched this video recently about synthesisers and recording equipment magazines (which operate incredibly similarly to cameras) and yeah, print magazines almost make YouTube reviewers look honest by comparison.

TLDR:

• he analysed a magazine from 2002 and out of 188 pages, 79 were full page ads (he didn't even bother to count half-page ads either, so the ad coverage was way higher)
• all reviews were positive except for the odd little minor comment, and none of the sub-category scores in any review were even below 2.5/5 (except one product which got 1.5/5 for a subcategory, but that was because it had too many ads!!)