This first post will talk about hardware so far.
360 video is a journey into the forefront of technology. It's doable, today, with tools new and old, but you will need to know a few things to have a successful journey.
360 video is in early adopter phase now. It will probably take a long time, if ever, to become mainstream because of the hardware and patience it requires.
I've committed to Gear 360 at this point. People could probably argue for or against. The few voices out there who care about this sort of thing seem to agree G360 is the most advanced small consumer camera out yet.
1. Cameras
Gear 360 is clearly the best camera out on the market so far. Resolution is acceptable, form factor is small, "it just works." Price is not astronomical. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hocIatxuddk Samsung seems committed to VR. You can edit video on your phone, not that I'd ever want to do that, but perhaps you might.
Your alternatives:
* Kodax Pixpro 4k - have to buy two cameras. Bulky. Software looks pretty intuitive. You need to stitch on the PC using two separate files. Expensive. Resolution is pretty good. Fry's might have one in stock.
* 360fly - not really 360, big blind spot on the bottom. There are a few of these type of products. It's not really immersive to see a big disc logo at the bottom of the image. You can buy this in Best Buy.
* Ricoh Theta S - lower resolution. Really unobtrusive form factor. In-device stitching (!) Can't expand the memory. I don't think this camera is one to get until they upgrade it to 4k and expandable memory.
* An array of GoPro's - super expensive, very complex postprocessing. Excellent resolution. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAYZU4A3w0
* Nikon announced a 360 camera at CES but so far no hardware.
* The DJI Osmo is also a really cool piece of kit, but the lens isn't all that high field of view, battery life is short, and it's more expensive than the Gear 360. It's not really not an immersive VR camera.
* How about a GoPro Black 4k or Sony 4k action cam? Picture quality is sweet, but will Youtube accept a 121 degree field of view video for Cardboard upload? I doubt it. There are tools for viewing "conventional" action cam vids on a set of goggles, but it's not really 360. So far neither of these companies are committed to 360 video. Perhaps we'll get a 360 Sony camera with the Playstation VR hardware? This is the difference between Sony and Samsung--Samsung seems more committed to immersive video with the Gear 360 and Gear VR combo, while Sony is taking a gaming tack with VR.
Realize the resolution will not differ a whole lot between products at a given price point because the underlying hardware is probably pretty similar.
2. Video card
You will need a graphics card to stitch video. A "real" graphics card. I had a $49 graphics card already installed with an AMD GPU, which doesn't help with stitching. There's probably a reason why stitching requires hardware acceleration with an Nvidia processor, but don't ask me what it is.
I went out to Fry's ended up with a GeForce GTX 970 with 4Gb RAM. I already had a pretty high-end desktop Lenovo i7 with 12Gb RAM, but it was stitching very slowly. I use the base Gear 360 software you download to stitch the video.
The Gear 360 gives you a video consisting of two globes, one from the "front" camera and one from the "rear" camera.
I'm not sure what the software is doing so slowly--the stitching isn't excellent. Color matching is not great and close objects definitely disappear in the stitch line. Also, it's not like the stitch line can move a lot during the clip, so frame by frame the stitching doesn't vary much. The system should analyze a few frames of the clip, decide how to stitch the two images together, and then do it.
The Gear 360 gives you a video consisting of two globes, one from the "front" camera and one from the "rear" camera.
I'm not sure what the software is doing so slowly--the stitching isn't excellent. Color matching is not great and close objects definitely disappear in the stitch line. Also, it's not like the stitch line can move a lot during the clip, so frame by frame the stitching doesn't vary much. The system should analyze a few frames of the clip, decide how to stitch the two images together, and then do it.
As an aside, the Gear 360 stitching software, ActionDirector but in a special version for Gear 360, has a serious memory leak problem. Leave it running overnight and don't expect control back over your computer until late the next day.
By the way, the 970 is not at all the highest end graphics card out there, but it has a reasonable number of CUDA cores for the price. Note, I'm not exactly sure what CUDA means, but it sounds like the more cores the better. Has anyone benchmarked stitching 360 video versus graphics card prices?
Of course Nvidia just released the 1060 but it's hard to find, a little more money, and not clearly better performance than the 970.
3. Power supply
The GTX 970 wanted a 500W power supply, so I swapped out the OEM 210W PS that came with the Lenovo. I'm not sure I want to find out what happens if you run the wrong spec PS on a higher end graphics card.
4. Phone linkup/viewfinder
It can be a little weird thinking about a camera with no viewfinder, but I think a 360 cam is distracting enough without having to worry about a second device to see the view. Therefore I use the camera with no viewfinder. I got the Gear 360 software working on my trusty Galaxy S5, but it doesn't work too well. I suppose I might as well upgrade to an S6 or S7 but they're still pretty expensive and I just can't bring myself to drop $650 on a phone that might easily end up in a toilet or in the ocean.
Really, if the camera is seeing everything around you, why on earth would you need a viewfinder? You can't even see half of what it's shooting anyway with any conventional viewfinder, so what's the point? The only two variables with this camera are keeping the horizon level and figuring out how high you want to hold it, neither of which require a viewfinder. You may disagree but that's my thought.
5. Hard drive
This video eats up a lot of HD space. Figure 3 minutes per Gb of raw, unstitched video, and another 3 minutes per Gb stitched. Then you have to produce the stitched clips into a final .mp4. Figure on 3Tb SATA for enough scratch space for editing.
