Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Samsung’s cute $350 Gear 360 VR camera is now available for purchase

Looking to make some immersive 360-degree content? Well, Samsung’s first camera aimed at creating 360-degree video is finally available for purchase, alongside the new Gear VR and the Galaxy Note 7. Here’s everything you need to know about the cute camera, and you can also read our full review here.

Make your own VR videos

While $350 may seem like a high price, there’s considerable value in the Gear 360 considering the fact that it offers 4K recording and works with Samsung smartphones and the Gear VR. Thanks to that backwards compatibility, the Gear 360 could be just what content creators need to start making quality 360-degree video.

Recommended Videos

Apart from being able to record in 4K, the round ball of a camera offers two f/2.0 fish-eye lenses, each packing a 15-megapixel sensor. It doesn’t have any storage of its own, but it does offer a MicroSD card slot capable of handling up to 128GB of storage.

Related Offer: Mobile virtual reality is here, check out Samsung’s Gear VR

Samsung has been dominating the market when it comes to consumer mobile VR. The company launched the Gear VR headset last year, which has become extremely popular. A decent VR camera was really the only big ingredient missing from Samsung’s VR ecosystem.

There are a slew of 360-degree cameras on the way — most of them are fairly pricey and targeted at professional content creators, but some are more consumer-friendly, such as the one from Samsung. LG also has its own 360-degree camera, which has a lower price tag of $200, but Samsung’s device beats LG’s when it comes to specs.

The camera is available online at various retailers, including Samsung’s own website, Amazon, and Best Buy.

Samsung Amazon Best Buy

This article was originally published in February. Christian de Looper, Julian Chokkattu, and Andy Boxall have contributed to this post. Updated on 08-19-2016 by Julian Chokkattu: Added news that the Gear 360 is now available for purchase. 

Christian de Looper
Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…
Samsung’s Galaxy Chromebook 2 360 looks solid for just $430
The Galaxy Chromebook 2 360 on a while background.

Samsung's student-first Galaxy Chromebook 2 360 is now available for purchase. The latest entry to the Galaxy Chromebook family packs a high resolution 16:10 aspect ratio display, as well as all-day battery life, and features like a spill-resistant keyboard with larger keycaps and a touchpad.

Pricing on the Galaxy Chromebook 2 360 starts at $430. Models include an Intel Celeron N45000 processor under the hood, with either 4GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of eMMC storage.

Read more
Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G vs. Google Pixel 6 camera shootout
The Samsung Galaxy S21 FE 5G and the Pixel 6 go head to head in a photoshoot.

Over the last few years, midrange smartphone photography has taken huge leaps in quality. As long as your lighting is good and your subjects aren't moving, you could definitely snap some Instagram-worthy shots. Two solid contenders in this category are the Google Pixel 6, and the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE. Both of these phones sit at around the $600 price point, and both will give you some really outstanding results.

Naturally, I decided to pit these phones against each other in a camera shootout. Both bring really solid cameras to the table, so I wanted to see where the strengths and weaknesses were by looking at a number of different categories and lighting conditions. Here's what I found.
Hardware

Read more
Can Google’s Pixel 6 Pro camera beat the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra? I found out
Galaxy S21 Ultra and Pixel 6 Pro.

The Google Pixel 6 Pro's camera has a lot of consumer expectations behind it given the Pixel 5's success and the new Tensor processor, but it also faces a lot of work to do to compete against the Galaxy S21 Ultra, the best camera Samsung has ever put on a phone. I took both the Samsung and Google phone out for the day to take a selection of photos, to answer the question: Which Android flagship has the best camera?
Camera specs and testing procedure
The Google Pixel 6 Pro's 50-megapixel main camera is joined by a 48MP telephoto camera with 4x optical zoom, plus a 12MP wide-angle camera. How about the Galaxy S21 Ultra? It was released in January 2021, but still has an enviable specification with a 108MP main camera, a 12MP wide-angle, a 10MP telephoto camera for 3x optical zoom photos, and a 10MP periscope camera for 10x optical zoom photos.

For this comparison, photos were taken back-to-back using the automatic mode, meaning all I did in most cases was press the shutter button. I tested the main camera, wide-angle, optical zoom, portrait, and night modes, but not video. All photos have been compared on a color-calibrated monitor, then resized for a friendlier online viewing experience. Do remember this when looking at the examples below.

Read more