Ricoh Theta V - Top 10 features; plus: comparison with other popular 360 cameras - UPDATED

Well I went ahead and bought and tested it. Right now to do a 7 bracket shoot in the Theta S it was taking 45 seconds. This is at 1/6, 1/15, 1/50, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500 and 1/1000. So the Theta V using the exact same settings as it’s the same app did the same shoot in 20 seconds. A little more than twice as fast. As a person who relies on HDR’s and bracketing this is a great speed up. Looking at image quality the Theta V has improved quiet a bit. Things that were not sharp, like air conditioning vents which were blurry on the S are now sharp on the V. I am good with my purchase and can’t wait to start developing add-ons for it.

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This is really cool to hear. Interesting how you could compare it so directly with the S. Is this for private use or something professional?

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It’s for private and professional use. I use it for doing HDR’s on set for Film and TV vfx.

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Oh wow, sounds cool. By “vfx” you mean you use the THETA for, what, adding extra effects to scenes somehow? How does that work? Would love to hear more details. Just personally curious.

No we use the Theta and DSLR’s with Fisheyes to make 360 bracketed pano’s. The reason we need bracketing is the HDR is not the ordinary photo HDR that you view on a daily basis. We combined the brackets together to make a high res 16 or 32 bit float HDR or lightprobe that keeps all the light information from the brightest brights to the darkest darks. Having this we take it into a 3D program such as Maya or Modo and actually use it to get the lighting generated to light the CG object in the scene. With good bracketed HDR’s we can get a CG object lit to 90% then only have to finesse the last 10%. Saves lots of time when do this, and also produces a much nicer looking object as the lighting matches and the reflection of the room show up too.

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