Insta360 X4

First-hand Insta360 X4 experience

The X4 replaced an aging Insta360 ONE X2 as part of a normal two- to three-year gear upgrade cycle. The reasons were practical as well as technical: batteries age quickly in a hot climate, while the X4 brought larger sensors, higher resolution, Active HDR and more AI-assisted features.

Although 8K was tested, 5.7K Active HDR became the more useful everyday mode. In practice, the extra dynamic range and low-light improvement mattered more than repeatedly producing very large 8K files that YouTube would often deliver to viewers at a lower effective quality after processing.

Compared with the X2, stabilization, stitching, low-light performance, battery behavior, heat management and file handling all felt improved. The larger sensors and Active HDR were especially noticeable indoors and under tree cover, where older 360 cameras had less light to work with.

The X4's built-in microphones and wind-noise reduction were good enough that external microphones became less important for the raw, minimally edited style used in much of the later archive. Existing invisible selfie sticks remained useful, while secure bicycle and motorcycle mounting became a priority because weak mounting setups can put an expensive 360 camera at risk.

Earlier in the archive, editing often involved OpenShot plus tools for restoring or managing 360 metadata. That workflow was extremely time-consuming, and high-resolution 360 rendering remained slow even on gaming-laptop hardware with an Intel i7-class CPU, GeForce graphics, about 6 GB of video memory and 16–32 GB of RAM. This is one reason later uploads increasingly favor a raw or lightly processed workflow.

Newer camera generations have since appeared, so the question is no longer whether the X4 was a worthwhile improvement over the X2; it was. The practical upgrade question is whether the improvement from a current camera to the newest model is large enough to justify the cost for the kind of footage being produced.