The Williamsbridge Oval Park & Recreation Center in the Norwood section of the Bronx – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA
I decided to finally test out my 360 degree Ricoh Theta S camera in the park near my house. I have been looking for a camera to create VR content. I am still not sure if I should ditch the Ricoh and get the Samsung Gear 360. The Ricoh is one of the easiest VR cameras to use because of the simplicity of the design. However the video quality on the Ricoh, while pretty good when running locally on my computer or mobile phone/tablet, gets totally crushed when uploaded to Facebook or YouTube.
I hear that the Gear 360, while not as user friendly, is handled much better on social media sites like YouTube. The only reasons I didn’t snag the Gear 360 it hasn’t been officially released in the US as of yet and I wanted get started shooting during my summer break. Plus my older Galaxy S5 is not supported by the software app needed to run the camera. Call me cheap but I didn’t want to also have to upgrade my phone to the newest Samsung (approximately 600 -700 bucks) in order to get the full functionality. So now I am hoping that a firmware update to the Ricoh, or future change on Facebook and YouTube will improve the upload quality.