Rylo Camera - is it worth it?

If you are following my YouTube channel, you would have noticed that my last few vids show a different video than my drone vids. Most of these were filmed on the Rylo camera. You might have seen this around on Instagram and Facebook; a miniature 360 camera with image stabilization.
Now I've used this camera for 3 months and this is an honest review based on my experiences.

First off, the camera build quality is excellent. It's a good weight and feels solid. The lenses do protrude out which is expected for a 360 camera. The case you see in the picture is the every day case. It holds the camera in and it has a Go Pro attachment to it. It comes with a small handle. The case seems very solidly built, but doesn't do anything to protect the actual camera.

There is also an adventure case, which has a plastic covering over both lenses and also is water proof up to 3 meters. This case is about $69 and honestly it is not worth the buy. I bought this case to specifically take the camera on a hiking trip to Patagonia. The lens covers are extremely fragile and get scratched very easily. You can see that in the following video. There is also a lot of refraction and the stitch lines become very noticeable when using this case. 

Now for the actual camera. The good things about the camera; it is very easy to use. The whole camera is controlled by two buttons; a power button and a record/mode button. This makes for shooting video seamless. Since it is a 360 camera, you don't have to worry about focusing on your subject. You can do that post recording. 

Which brings us to the app. It is very intuitive and easy to use. You can click on any part of the screen and choose it to follow this spot or person. It is truly an impressive app. Now if you are android user, the app does have some issues with larger video files and tends to occasionally crash. But with the newer updates, it seems far less.
The camera really shines when you upload all 360 degrees.

Now for the bad things about the camera. The camera shoots 4k for the whole 360 video. So if you use the app and crop the video to show one view point, the video is significantly lower resolution. A 180 view looks less than 1080p resolution. It looks good on a small screen, but anything bigger than a phone screen and the video looks very low quality. But if you are mainly making videos to upload to Instagram or Facebook for mobile viewing, then it is a perfectly fine resolution. Anything larger and it is not very useful.

Another thing I've noticed about the video is that it is shot in MP4 which is a compressed format. This makes sense as it takes less storage. But the video cannot be edited much. If you want to turn up the saturation or increase saturation, it brings out a lot of pixelation and noise in the video. This was using one of the recommended cards. 

Continuing on image quality, the colors all seem to be washed out. This is with both video and photos. Now the April 2018 update did address this and the video saturation seems to have improved. Being a video camera, photos are a bit lackluster on this. They seem soft throughout and not terribly impressive. Hopefully this is a software issue that can be fixed and not a hardware issue.

Bottom line: Is this camera worth buying? Depends. If you are going to make videos that tailor to mobile feeds, then yes. The ease of recording, directing and editing make it a no brainer. If you are using the video for Youtube or another video platform, then no. The effective resolution on this does not translate well to a larger screen. I have lots of videos on my channel that were shot on the Rylo camera. Watch and make the decision yourself.

The Traveling Cynic