Ricoh Theta is a cute little camera provides you with the ability to shoot a 360-degree picture in one shot. It comes with an app where you can view your pictures and videos and more importantly, you can share your pictures with your friends and family members using Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter or just send it to folks via email. As folks get to experience VR via their headsets and cardboards, they are going to look for something like this to build their own 360 images and videos. See our previous article on this emerging trend. https://vrhappening.com/223-2/

The camera is available in two different versions. The first version was known as the Theta M15 and the latest edition of this nifty tool is called the Theta S. The M15 is a small little spherical panorama camera that is extremely fast and captures 360 true spherical video. This model is rather suited to be enjoyed by amateurs and professionals alike who are looking for a new and innovative creative medium. The camera works with both iOS as well as Android operating systems. For the price, the camera does an excellent job of stitching the content in very intuitive manner. For VR content developers this is a valuable tool that helps in rapid environment capture and rapid prototyping so that you can integrate the shots into your own VR content.

Unfortunately this first/basic edition also has a lot of issues and much to be desired. The biggest complaint that the users have with the tool is its low resolution (< 3Mp). The images get grainy when trying to use the zoom feature. Fine-tuning the camera settings (shutter speed, exposure, etc) can be cumbersome and frustrating. You need to adjust in the app, take the picture, wait for the picture to sync to the phone, re-adjust, repeat. There is also a 5 minute limit to the video length time which handicaps a lot of use cases. Hosting the images that you shot directly into your own website is not easy and the technical support from Ricoh has not been the best.

A lot of the problems experienced with the basic M15 edition are intended to be fixed in the more advanced Ricoh Theta S model. An initial reaction from professional users is that the video resolution is still below expectations. It can take stills up to 5K which is really nice, but the video is recorded as two hemispheres side-by-side in a 1920×1080 frame. This means that when you use their software to stitch the two halves together, you’ll get a less than 1080p image, blown up to 1920×960. The Theta S does provide truly immersive pictures. The company however claims that the new unit provides Full HD 1080p Video Recording at 30 fps. The iOS app works flawlessly and can remotely control the camera. The automatic settings out of the box seem to work well. The S controls feel very responsive (the m15 had a bit of a delay that you could get used to). The 360 stitching in the camera seems to be improved a bit over the M15. Internal memory has been updated to 8GB on this new model. The M15 only provided you with 4GB memory. Some of the problems that users had with the earlier product in low light situations have been also addressed in the new model. The internal lithium-ion battery offers up to 260 shots per charge before needing to be recharged via the included USB cable. This is also one of the models that can be attached to a small drone to get some very interesting 360 experiences. The pictures taken by the camera can also be experienced with your Gear VR headset or your Oculus Rift. Unlike the Panono – a 360-degree camera ‘ball’ – the Ricoh Theta S is easily pocketable and is covered in a grippy black rubber coating that makes it easy to handle. Physical controls are kept to a minimum. You get a shutter button for taking photos or shooting video, a power button, a Wi-Fi button and the ability to switch between shooting stills or video. For those of you that want to hack the Theta S system and do more including integrating Raspberry pi, please see a detailed link here. http://codetricity.github.io/theta-s/.

Editing is relatively easy. You can use the Vegas software from SONY or the première pro software to do the basic editing of your content.

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