Emanuel

No. Remember: the First Amendment ; ) Secondly, we now have AI, and AI can be made to justify almost anything ;- ) The Soviet Union came to an end on Christmas Day, 1991.

WOW What a thread! :- )

Exactly, that is the interesting part for me too. I don’t think the best use of this will necessarily be obvious “POV footage” in the usual action-camera sense. The more interesting uses may be the almost invisible ones: situations where the camera is there, alive, following attention, but not constantly being operated in a way that announces itself to everyone in the room. Your point about parallax and offset is completely fair. If the camera is too far from the head, then the head direction and the actual camera perspective will never match perfectly. But I am not sure that perfect matching is always the goal. In many documentary or making-of situations, what matters is not to reproduce the exact optical perspective of the eye, but to reduce the burden of manual operation and preserve a more natural relation with the subject. That is why I find it interesting for BTS, documentary and observational work. Not as a perfect substitute for a shoulder camera, not as a Steadicam either, even though, as a gimbal camera, it belongs to a lineage that goes much further back, including the invention that so impressed Kubrick that Garrett Brown ended up operating his own system on THE SHINING. I see it more as a small autonomous B-camera, or a reactive camera system, able to follow intention without forcing the operator to constantly lift, aim, correct and therefore disturb the situation. In a film set, for instance, the value may be precisely in allowing the device to become boring after a while. If people stop reacting to it, or react to it less than to a conventional camera operator moving around with a visible setup, then it starts doing something useful. So yes, I think the strongest uses for it may be almost invisible. Not spectacular POV shots, but the kind of footage that exists because the tool reduced the amount of intervention needed to capture it.

Yes, but I don’t think it is exactly the same thing. A Go clipped to a hat gives you a small head-mounted action camera. Useful, of course, and probably better for some pure POV situations. And I say this as someone who actually owns two Insta360 GO 2 units and the GO Ultra. In fact, the GO Ultra was also used in the making-of situation I mentioned above, so I am not dismissing that kind of camera at all. But the interesting part of the Luna accessory, at least to me, is not simply “put a camera where the head is”. It is the possibility of using the head as a control input while the camera itself can remain somewhere else. And that is a whole different thing. With a hat-mounted camera, the camera position, lens, sensor, stabilisation, codec, monitoring and point of view are all physically tied to the head. With something like Luna Ultra, you are potentially dealing with a much larger sensor, better latitude/dynamic range, 10-bit colour, log recording, stronger codec options, proper monitoring, several focal lengths, a real gimbal system and a camera body that can be placed where the shot actually makes sense. So it is not just “POV versus POV”. It is the difference between a tiny self-contained action camera recording from the head, and a more complete image acquisition system where the head becomes one possible way of controlling the frame. The gaze and the camera body become partially decoupled. The head can guide the framing, but the camera can still benefit from a better sensor, 10-bit recording, log capture, stronger codec, better lens choice, better stabilisation, better monitoring, better audio possibilities and a more deliberate production setup. So I agree that an Insta360 Go on a hat is a valid alternative for some situations. But I see this as potentially more than that: not just a POV camera, but a different way of operating a small gimbal camera with less visible intervention from the operator, while still keeping the image quality, 10-bit colour depth, focal-length flexibility and production control of a more serious camera system. And the outcome is already starting to speak for itself. Even if the example comes from the competing Osmo Pocket 4P/Pro side, the IQ benchmark is becoming very clear. D-Log 2 10-bit colour: https://www.facebook.com/reel/937883892382597 Small pocket gimbal cameras are no longer just convenience tools or “good enough” secondary cameras. They are beginning to produce images that can stand on their own, with a cinematic quality that would have been unthinkable in this form factor only a few years ago. Back to the subject and to my eyes, this is not just a clever accessory. It is part of a real revolution already in motion.

I think the POV Head Tracker should not be seen merely as a vlogging gimmick or as another accessory for people who want to film themselves walking down the street. There are many different ways of filming, framing and capturing reality. The most “professional” approach is often understood as the most controlled one: you plan the shoot, you discuss the framing, you block the scene, you decide where the camera goes, you decide what the subject is supposed to give you, and then you execute. That is obviously valid, and it is the basis of a lot of good cinema. But it is not the only way to make images. There is also another tradition: a more intuitive, observational, physical and spontaneous way of filming, where the camera is less a machine imposing a pre-decided frame on the world and more an extension of the filmmaker’s presence inside that world. That is where I think something like the Insta360 POV Head Tracker becomes interesting. The question is not only “what can it do technically?” The question is: what kind of relationship with reality does it allow? When you are operating a camera in the conventional way, you are always doing several things at once. You are looking, framing, correcting, adjusting, deciding, reacting, and at the same time you are also visibly present as “the person filming”. That presence changes the situation. It changes the people in front of you. It changes the rhythm of what happens. It can intimidate, formalise, freeze or theatricalise reality. In documentary, this is especially important. The more you plan, the more you risk fixing the subject before you have really encountered it. You may think you are observing reality, but you are already working on a construction of reality. You are no longer only receiving what is in front of you. You are fabricating a gaze, and the subject starts to exist inside that fabrication. Of course, complete objectivity does not exist. Every image is already a point of view. But there is still a big difference between a camera that constantly announces itself as an intervention and a camera system that allows the filmmaker to remain more physically and psychologically inside the situation. This is why the POV Head Tracker interests me. It may allow the filmmaker to film without constantly “operating” in the traditional sense. The camera can follow the natural direction of the filmmaker’s attention. The image can become closer to a lived point of view rather than a pre-composed shot. Not perfect objectivity, obviously, but perhaps a more immediate form of subjectivity. That distinction matters. A head-tracked gimbal camera could be useful not because it replaces deliberate cinematography, but because it opens another mode of acquisition: a more instinctive, embodied, less intimidating mode. It lets you be present with the subject while still filming. It can reduce the gap between seeing and recording. In that sense, I see a possible historical parallel with what happened when smaller 16mm cameras became available. Those cameras did not simply make cinema smaller. They changed the grammar of cinema. They allowed filmmakers to move differently, to follow people differently, to enter rooms differently, to film streets, faces, accidents, gestures, private moments and unstable situations in ways that would have been much harder with heavier, more industrial tools. You can connect that to cinéma vérité, direct cinema, the Nouvelle Vague, the New American Cinema, Jonas Mekas in New York, underground and independent filmmaking, and later the influence of that freer, more mobile language on figures like Cassavetes, Scorsese, and the whole post-studio generation. Even mainstream cinema eventually absorbed some of that looseness, that handheld energy, that search for immediacy. Jonas Mekas is not just an abstract reference for me. I had the privilege of knowing him personally in the mid-1990s, at the Figueira da Foz International Film Festival, which he used to attend. In that same context, I was also fortunate enough to receive an award as best daily press film critic. More importantly, a project I am still developing today was born precisely from that contact with Mekas. So when I refer to him here, I am not only invoking a name from film history. I am also referring to a very concrete personal encounter with a way of understanding cinema as diary, presence, immediacy, memory and life. The technology did not create those artistic revolutions by itself. But it made certain gestures possible. And when a tool makes a new gesture possible, it can also make a new kind of cinema possible. That is how I would look at the POV Head Tracker. Not as “AI tracking for creators”, but as a small step toward a different relation between body, gaze and camera. From the end of last month and carrying into this June, I worked on the making-of for A NOITE, Leonel Vieira’s film adaptation of José Saramago’s homonymous play. During the shoot, we used the Osmo Pocket 3 alongside other cameras, including a Sony A7S III, an FX30, a Panasonic GX80/GX85 and other small-format tools, Insta360 included. The film itself was being shot on two ARRI cameras, so this kind of low-profile equipment was obviously not what people on a cinema set are most used to seeing. Even Leonel Vieira, the director, looked at the Osmo Pocket 3 and jokingly said it looked like a toy camera. But that was precisely part of the point. I took the initiative to use it without hesitation, accepting the risks of bringing that kind of device into a professional film set, and combining it with different optical tools, including black mist filters to create atmosphere, Sirui anamorphic lenses and other accessories. In that context, I became very aware of how valuable it would be to have a device that lets me film without constantly managing the camera as an object. Not to mention that 10-bit Log recording is now available on the Luna Ultra as well. In a making-of situation, the best moments often happen before people know they are “performing” for the camera. They happen between takes, in hesitations, glances, silences, rehearsals, small gestures, private exchanges, and moments when the machinery of cinema briefly becomes human again. But the moment you raise the camera, adjust the frame, move closer, correct the angle, ask for space or visibly operate, you can lose the very thing you were trying to capture. The reality in front of the lens changes because of you. And that is fundamental in a making-of context: to be as minimally intrusive as possible, so as not to disturb the set of the main film being shot. The reactions of the professionals involved are, in many ways, the real subject of a making-of, and those reactions should not be manipulated by the visible presence of the image-capturing device itself. In our case, we were working with a very small crew: two to three people at most. In fact, it was necessary to convince Leonel Vieira to accept a maximum of three people, because ideally he preferred two, and sometimes only one person could be present. In those situations, when only one person was shooting and I still needed two possible angles, a camera A and a camera B, the only viable option was to have a B camera as autonomous and unobtrusive as possible, which is exactly how the Osmo Pocket 3 was used. With a device such as the Luna Ultra and its POV Head Tracker, that kind of work would become much easier, not only during the shoot itself but also later, when reaching the post-production suite and needing more options in the edit. So a device that lets the camera follow your attention, while your hands and your body remain less occupied by the act of filming, could be extremely useful. It could allow the operator to be less intrusive, less theatrical, less visibly extractive. It could make the camera feel less like a weapon pointed at reality and more like a witness moving through it. That does not mean this is for every situation. It is not a substitute for composed cinematography, lighting, blocking, lenses, or intentional mise-en-scène. But it could be very valuable for documentary, making-of work, rehearsal footage, street filming, travel, observational cinema, and any situation where spontaneity matters more than perfect formal control. The professional instinct is often to control everything. But sometimes cinema gains power when we control less. Sometimes the most authentic image is not the one we planned best, but the one we were able to receive before reality became aware of our plan. That, to me, is where the POV Head Tracker could become genuinely interesting.

No idea about you guys, but I am in love with this tool accessory... pretty useful in those much different configurations: Head tracker, finger tracker/tracking, etc.* ; ) *shoulder mode: More comparisons here and there or yet this one too from same Chinese tester BTW. And here, more for the new Osmo Pocket 4P/Pro with the sample(s) of the new add-ons introduced (whereas Luna Ultra reaches 4K120fps across 20-60mm, DJI's Osmo Pocket 4P/Pro goes up to 4K200fps at the telephoto end). Haven't you bought a gimbal-pocket-cam yet? This is for those who will buy one then : D ;- )

Here's another from same 1st round of comparative tests: And about the Insta360 detachable screen vs DJI FrameTap remote: The sound in slowmo sounds just different enough too... Unlike the Osmo Pocket 4 / 4P (Pro), the Luna Ultra appears not only to provide 48 kHz AAC audio listed at a higher 32-bit depth — with true 32-bit float reserved for the external Mic Pro/transmitter — rather than standard 16-bit audio; it also appears to make 4K100/120fps available as a standard video mode, effectively usable as HFR when and where needed, captured as straight acquisition rather than pre-baked slow motion. That is a different proposition from restricting those frame rates to a dedicated slow-motion mode with more limited audio handling. So yes, both may offer “slow motion” (4K200/240fps with DJI) but audio-wise, this is more apples to oranges than apples to apples. And in slowmo, DJI does not appear to include built-in Mic Audio Backup either. That matters because, once high-frame-rate capture is baked into a dedicated slow-motion mode, the audio can no longer behave like normal sync sound unless the footage is brought back to real time. By contrast, 4K100/120fps as standard video mode is straight HFR acquisition: usable in real time with normal audio, or slowed down later in post.

Well stated @eatstoomuchjam @kye :- )

Indeed : ) https://freewellgear.com/blogs/news/dji-osmo-pocket-4p-vs-insta360-luna-ultra But: I wonder whether will Insta360 POV Head Tracker, or something similar, come to the Osmo Pocket ecosystem too? Will DJI eventually offer something like this? If they do, it might sound a little like DJI quietly admitting that Insta360 has come up with something genuinely unique this time or once again? LOL* ; ) At least for now... *disclaimer: happy DJI user here and just as happy an Insta360 camper... The FrameTap remote is interesting, but it is not really the same thing. The Luna’s head-controlled POV accessory makes it** feel like a more distinctive product: **AND Insta360 products, in general, BTW... : X

Fascinating to say the least : ) His text and voice included ;- )

https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/gimbals/hohem-isteady-mt3-pro-review https://store.hohem.com/blogs/news/the-ultimate-all-in-one-stabilizer-hohem-isteady-mt3-pro-review-is-the-ai-tracking-worth-it Any takers / user experience over here?

Fair point. Agreed : ) A proper apples-to-apples test should also include each mirrorless camera in its best baked-in Rec.709 / HDR / tone-mapped profile, not only Log. Log is obviously not meant to be judged as a finished image straight out of camera. But that was not really the point. The point is not that the Luna has “better” image quality than an FX3, R6-style camera or any serious mirrorless body in a controlled professional workflow. It clearly does not. The interesting part is that this tiny dedicated video camera is giving a highly usable, stabilised, low-light image immediately, with very little operator burden, in a form factor where people would normally expect a large compromise. That is where the disruption is: not pure sensor performance, but the whole capture pipeline: lens, stabilisation, exposure strategy, temporal processing, denoising, subject visibility and ready-to-use output. So yes, a mirrorless camera can absolutely be configured to produce a good baked-in image. But the Luna is attacking a different use case: fast handheld available-light shooting where the question is not “which camera has the most flexible file in post?”, but “which camera gets me a usable shot right now, from my pocket, without rigging, lighting or grading?” That does not make it a cinema camera replacement. It makes it a much more serious pocket production tool than this category used to be.

This is where computational photography becomes impossible to ignore and where it starts to look more like computational cinematography. These Luna Ultra low-light comparisons are not simply about sensor size, ISO or aperture. They are about the entire imaging pipeline. The Luna is not just “seeing better” in the traditional optical sense; it is processing harder. It is lifting shadows, stabilising exposure, reducing noise, rebuilding colour, brightening faces and subjects, and delivering an immediately usable image in situations where more traditional camera pipelines can look extremely dark straight out of camera. The Sony FX3 comparison is especially revealing. The FX3 is a serious full-frame low-light video/cinema camera, here shown in 4K S-Log 3 at ISO 12,800, f/2.8 and a 180° shutter. That is not a weak setup. The Canon R6 V comparison is also striking, with the camera shown in 4K C-Log 2 at ISO 25,600, f/2.8 and 1/50. Yet, in these posted frames, both traditional camera images look dramatically darker than the Luna Ultra low-light mode. Of course, this does not mean the Luna is “better” than an FX3 or a Canon cinema-style camera in any broad professional sense. It is not. Log footage is not supposed to be judged as a finished image before grading, and larger-sensor cameras still have major advantages in colour depth, dynamic range control, lens choice, codec robustness, monitoring, rigging and production workflow. Properly exposed, lit and graded, they remain much more flexible tools. But that is not really the point. The disruptive point is that the Luna is delivering a visible, usable image immediately, in situations where a traditional cinema pipeline still expects the operator to expose carefully, light when necessary, grade later and finish the image in post. The iPhone comparison makes the argument even more interesting, because a phone is already a computational camera. Smartphones built their reputation by using software to overcome small sensors: multi-frame processing, HDR, tone mapping, noise reduction, subject detection and AI-assisted reconstruction. So when the Luna Ultra in 4K low light Mode produces a dramatically more visible image than the iPhone 17 Pro Max 1x lens in this kind of scene, the story is no longer just “computational camera beats traditional camera”. It is “a dedicated computational video camera can beat a flagship smartphone at its own game”. That distinction matters. Smartphone night photography and smartphone low-light video are not the same thing. Phones can do extraordinary things with stills because they can merge frames, hold exposure, stabilise aggressively and tolerate a more processed photographic look. Video is harder. It has to work continuously, frame after frame, without destroying motion, faces, texture and temporal consistency. In this example, the iPhone image remains very dark, while the Luna Ultra clearly prioritises subject visibility, colour recovery and immediate usability. So the real lesson is this: low-light performance is no longer just a hardware contest. It is sensor plus lens plus stabilisation plus temporal denoising plus tone mapping plus AI reconstruction plus exposure strategy. The most useful image may come not from the device with the largest sensor, but from the device with the smartest pipeline. The Luna does not replace cinema cameras. It does not replace phones either. But it attacks the space between them: fast, handheld, available-light video where the most important question is not “which camera has the biggest sensor?”, but “which camera gives me the shot I can actually use?” And in these comparisons, the answer is surprisingly uncomfortable for devices that are much bigger, much more expensive, and much more established. source

Not only the Leica :- )

Great posts, sticky this! Your contribution here @kye is priceless and a fine example for everyone, myself included : ) It's always a pleasure to read your thoughts! :- ) Keep going… I’m linking to it elsewhere, BTW ; -) Food for my trainee students. : D

Breaking news. The product is so obvious no-brainer, DJI has decided to declare a legal war against their most serious threat: https://petapixel.com/2026/06/11/dji-is-suing-insta360-for-violating-multiple-osmo-pocket-patents/ The apocalyptic precedent is Kodak v. Polaroid, where Kodak was effectively pushed out of instant photography, but that was a much deeper, ecosystem-level disaster, not just another Tuesday in consumer electronics litigation. DJI has itself been through patent warfare with Autel over drones. And Insta360 recently faced GoPro in a camera-related dispute that did not exactly erase its current lineup from existence. Apple and Samsung spent years throwing patent grenades at each other before settling.

When not the Leica MP or the new Insta360 Luna Ultra, they use one of those Blazar anamorphic AF lenses on the camera operated by the person accompanying him and here's a good sample:

Impressive if nothing else ; ) And here’s another feature that is, undeniably, not only pure fun: ...but just useful enough to say the least : X

Hard to compete with the Chinese, humm? Looks like (real) life follows politics.

Yes, indeed, but a few third-party brands offer that simple, inexpensive accessory, and it can easily be added to your setup.

Well, for the price of a good but still affordable zoom lens, I still find it quite a deal! ; ) And AFAIK, it’s the first gimbal camera you can simply lock: No idea whether the Osmo Pocket 4P will bring that too, but the non-Pro version doesn’t seem to. EDIT -- I had heard that the Pocket 4 didn’t have it, but as far as I’ve been able to confirm now, they’ve introduced it across both new Pocket 4 models. Looks like the battle between the two brands has brought some benefits for their customers... ;- )

Originally posted in another thread, but given what it is, I think it deserves a place of its own. There’s something very real happening here right now. This is not just a minor upgrade. : ) Insta360 sample for focal length range. source (from Leica HQ BTW) And that detachable screen is basically an on-set field monitor. WOW What a killer combo : X

In the meantime... today, 8:30am EDT: EDIT -- 9am (less than 5 minutes to go) https://www.youtube.com/live/GW05hlCl8sw Just a small note: anyone who shoots every day, across very different and often demanding shooting scenarios, will understand why this launch (with internal 32-bit float stereo BTW when coupled to Mic Pro) is so exciting. EDIT 2 -- And here is, just released Melbourne by one of the usual suspects:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ayD92_55eZom1FTxYGxE6KA_fnjkNwHn