With a traditional action camera, I spent years guessing where to point it and getting it wrong constantly — framed the wrong direction during the best part of a ride, missed the actual action because I was looking at my hands instead. The X4 removes that guesswork entirely, because it films everything around it and lets you decide the shot afterward.
The Core Idea: Film Everything, Frame It Later
The X4 uses dual lenses to capture a full 360-degree sphere around the camera at up to 8K resolution, and the actual magic happens in Insta360's app afterward, where you choose your framing, angle, and movement in post-production rather than committing to a single fixed field of view while filming. This completely eliminates the single biggest frustration I had with traditional action cameras: pointing the lens the wrong way during the moment that actually mattered. With the X4, that moment is always captured somewhere in the sphere — you just need to find and frame it afterward.
The Invisible Selfie Stick Effect
Because the camera captures a full sphere, mounting it on an extended selfie stick and editing afterward makes the stick itself disappear from the final footage — the software effectively erases it since it sits in a blind spot relative to the chosen framing. This produces genuinely striking, seemingly impossible drone-like or floating-camera shots from a handheld stick, and it's become the single feature that gets the most unprompted comments when I share travel footage, because people can't immediately figure out how the shot was captured.
Reframing and Stabilization in Practice
Beyond just choosing an angle after the fact, the app lets you keyframe camera movement across a clip — panning and reframing dynamically through a single continuous 360 capture as if you'd operated a second camera live. Combined with genuinely excellent electronic stabilization (Insta360's FlowState tech), footage from mountain biking or running stays remarkably smooth even over rough terrain, noticeably better than the stabilization I got from my previous traditional action camera in comparable conditions.
Image Quality: Good, With an Honest Caveat
At 8K 360 capture, resolution is genuinely impressive for the format, but it's worth understanding that 8K spread across a full sphere means the effective resolution of any single reframed shot you pull out is lower than a dedicated flat 8K camera pointed directly at the same subject. In good light, output quality for social media and even reasonably sized displays looks excellent; in low light, noise becomes more noticeable than on a dedicated flat sensor camera at a similar price. Know this trade-off going in rather than expecting flat-camera-equivalent low-light performance from a 360 sensor spread this wide.
Battery Life and Real-World Endurance
Battery life at high resolution 360 capture is honestly modest — expect meaningfully shorter run times than a comparable flat-lens action camera at similar settings, given the sensor and processing demands of full-sphere capture. I now carry two spare batteries for any full day of filming, which is a real added cost and hassle worth factoring into the total ownership experience rather than a footnote.
The Editing Workflow Reality
Getting the most out of this camera genuinely requires spending real time in the Insta360 app choosing framing and movement after each shoot — this is not a point-and-shoot camera where footage is immediately ready to post the way flat action camera clips often are. If you don't enjoy or have time for post-production, a meaningful portion of the X4's actual advantage over a traditional action camera goes unused, and you'd likely be better served by a simpler flat-lens camera.
Who Should Buy This
If you consistently know your shot in advance — a fixed mount, a predictable angle, a controlled setting — a traditional flat action camera is simpler, has better low-light performance, and needs less post-production work. This camera earns its price for unpredictable, fast-moving activities where you genuinely don't know what the best angle will be until after the moment happens, and for anyone who actually enjoys the editing process enough to unlock the reframing feature's full potential.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Eliminates the classic action-camera problem of pointing the wrong direction at the key moment
- Invisible selfie stick effect produces genuinely striking, drone-like footage
- Excellent electronic stabilization across rough, dynamic activities
- Flexible post-shoot reframing gives creative control most action cameras lack
Cons:
- Effective resolution per reframed shot is lower than a dedicated flat 8K camera
- Noticeably shorter battery life than comparable flat-lens action cameras
- Requires real post-production time in the app to realize its full advantage
- Weaker low-light performance than flat sensor cameras at a similar price
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to edit every clip in the app?
Not strictly — the camera can output a standard flat video directly too, but you lose the reframing and invisible-stick advantages that are the main reasons to choose a 360 camera over a traditional one.
How long does the battery actually last?
Real-world runtime at high-resolution 360 capture is noticeably shorter than flat action cameras; carrying at least one spare battery is strongly recommended for a full day of filming.
Final Verdict
This camera didn't make me a better filmmaker. It removed the one mistake — pointing the lens the wrong way at the wrong moment — that had quietly ruined more of my favorite memories than I'd ever admitted to myself.
Rating: 8.9/10 — I stopped missing the shot the moment I stopped having to choose it in advance.