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04-26-2017, 05:22 PM   #46
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QuoteOriginally posted by falconeye Quote
The YI 360 VR camera is an important product.

YI is known to bypass non-Chinese companies with less traditional products than a DSLR. GoPro now is in deep trouble because it can't compete with YI anymore. Even Google choose to partner with YI for its VR Jump project. Not GoPro. Not Ricoh Theta. Known as the YI Halo (17,000 USD).

YI has a very transparent spec sheet. They use two 4k camera and two 220 degree lenses. If distortion free, it would yield 6.3k. In practice, they obtain 5.7k which sounds about right.

5.7k VR is 1580 per 100 degree eye lens. Within a typical 50 degree FV, you are left with 790 pixels width. That about PAL quality TV, about the minimum one may actually accept. 4k VR (or even HD VR) are below the minimum quality threshold.

So yes, this YI 360 VR culd be the first affordable VR camera which isn't a toy actually. Which unfortunately includes the 4k Theta.
A well engineered tool as the theta is not a toy. This Yi thing is a thrown together box of specs. Nothing more.

04-26-2017, 06:02 PM   #47
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We wont have to wait to long to see the Youtube comparisons...the YI action cams are good and so are the prices.
04-26-2017, 08:47 PM   #48
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Actually what Ron and surfar say could be a glimpse of the future for Pentax..For what I seen, Chinese,Malaysians and Phillipines are raving and spending a lot more on cameras, much more than Japanese right now and prefer alternative brands other than the 3 major Japanese cameras brands.
The Yi M1 is a very nice camera produced with the young and incoming crop of photogs in mind, and Pentax should be riding on that wave. I wouldnt be suprised that the next Pentax dslr contain Asian (not Japanese(Sony) sensors and related electronics.
04-26-2017, 09:14 PM   #49
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The future is mindboggling...tech is moving fast....a bit too fast for some, but they can always go back to film....Fuji will supply it for them!

04-26-2017, 10:07 PM   #50
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QuoteOriginally posted by falconeye Quote
The YI 360 VR camera is an important product.

YI is known to bypass non-Chinese companies with less traditional products than a DSLR. GoPro now is in deep trouble because it can't compete with YI anymore. Even Google choose to partner with YI for its VR Jump project. Not GoPro. Not Ricoh Theta. Known as the YI Halo (17,000 USD).

YI has a very transparent spec sheet. They use two 4k camera and two 220 degree lenses. If distortion free, it would yield 6.3k. In practice, they obtain 5.7k which sounds about right.

5.7k VR is 1580 per 100 degree eye lens. Within a typical 50 degree FV, you are left with 790 pixels width. That about PAL quality TV, about the minimum one may actually accept. 4k VR (or even HD VR) are below the minimum quality threshold.

So yes, this YI 360 VR culd be the first affordable VR camera which isn't a toy actually. Which unfortunately includes the 4k Theta.
I have my doubts that a difference in nominally 5.6 vs 4k might be visually distinguishable, especially if the implementation and processing pipeline is not known. Your calculation makes sense but your conclusion that there might be a discrete numeral threshold above which everything is fine and below everything unusable is just an exaggeration and does not consider many additional factors, processing, implementation, perception.
I have used the Yi action camera and was utterly disappointed by the image quality, especially as I did some attempts at image based modelling, which has proven to work decent enough with GoPros.

Last edited by MMVIII; 04-26-2017 at 10:25 PM.
04-27-2017, 01:19 AM   #51
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QuoteOriginally posted by Jeff Lopez Quote
Actually what Ron and surfar say could be a glimpse of the future for Pentax..For what I seen, Chinese,Malaysians and Phillipines are raving and spending a lot more on cameras, much more than Japanese right now and prefer alternative brands other than the 3 major Japanese cameras brands.
The Yi M1 is a very nice camera produced with the young and incoming crop of photogs in mind, and Pentax should be riding on that wave. I wouldnt be suprised that the next Pentax dslr contain Asian (not Japanese(Sony) sensors and related electronics.
I live in a tourist town which gets many hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The surrounding area gets even more. Many, perhaps even the majority, are from the Far East. When these visitors, often tour groups, have money they really have money like it is going out of style. I've got quite used to seeing, say, a Canon 5D Mark III or Mark IV plus an L series lens round the neck of someone who really doesn't look all that interested in photography. What they are interested in, perhaps, is a quality product from a solid brand name and they can easily afford whatever it takes. My best score so far is two couples from Japan touring the town together, with each of the men wearing two Leicas in leather half-cases.

What we get up to in the West is increasingly not where it's happening. I would guess that Canon's relatively good performance over the past few years is down in large part to their building a powerhouse of a sales and marketing machine in Asia. Among the Asian visitors here, Canon beat Nikon by a large margin. That's why the Chinese government admonishing Nikon over the D600 fiasco was so disastrous for the company. It would have been like a European company being black-marked and run out of town in North America in the 70s or 80s. Goodbye your best and biggest new market.

The young, OTOH, are mainly for smartphones. The cameras tend to be for the older folks. But then they are the ones with the money.

I'd be very wary of writing off the new Chinese companies like Yi. They may get it wrong, of course, but they are plugging into a huge and wealthy system we just don't understand over here.

Last edited by mecrox; 04-27-2017 at 01:39 AM.
04-27-2017, 05:41 AM   #52
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For a Japanese, a high end camera was bought for value..
For a Chinese, the same camera was bought for status.
Japanese are very conservative and family value based, and that usually instills in family generations. Therefore, the typical Japanese man wouldnt buy an expensive toy, as you have described, until he has fulfilled higher priorities, like raising children and buying a house.
But Chinese are very different. They live the here and now, like why should I wait to buy my toy, if I have the cash right now..
As we know, Asia has all of a sudden broken with the 9 to 5 factory work box and most young people and recent graduates are self employed and entreprenuers, mostly into fashion, movies, cars, and tourism business. While Japan has been on the economic borderline since the quake (or rather the excuse of that), Mainland Asia took over the trading business single handed, and getting pretty rich..Proof? How many Hollywood films are produced by Chinese coops? a lot, (East Europe too).
Then we have the anti Japanese sentiment, which curiously springs from Chinese students..let me quote a Chinese researcher, Richard Chen..

"Many Chinese include some of my friends in Beijing adopt the following rules:

Unless it is necessary, do not buy Japanese goods, for examples Japanese camera is bought as no good replacement if someone want to be a good photographer.
if there is an replacement of Japanese goods, and the quality is good, stop buying Japanese goods.
No travel to Japan unless it is necessary.
No Japanese car.
etc"

This happens to be the general feeling among the Chinese youth..
So back to the point, I see young asian professionals and yuppies buying their own national products, becuase of 3 factors
1-Support national brands
2-Cheaper than Japanese imports ( you be better off ordering a Nikon from Amazon shipping to Shezuan than buying it inside China)
3-Chinese electronics are really getting better and better, which we dont see because what we buy from Ebay are inferior quality stuff that the same Chinese wont consume, the good stuff they keep it for themselves.. have you seen those 2017 Mitakon Yonghy lenses? they dared the f/1.0 limit without the Summicron price (Hauwai, Xioami phones have Samsung really worried, Sony quit that race long time ago with good reason).
Pentax is a very loved brand in China, leaps and bounds more than in Japan,its affordable and very good quality for them..

04-28-2017, 03:35 AM - 1 Like   #53
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Pic from NAB:
from dpreview
04-28-2017, 08:41 AM   #54
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QuoteOriginally posted by D1N0 Quote
Pic from NAB:
from dpreview
Anybody know what that last bullet point is about Android phones?
04-28-2017, 08:46 AM   #55
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QuoteOriginally posted by geomez Quote
Anybody know what that last bullet point is about Android phones?
It sounds like the Theta 4K is actually running Android and that Ricoh hopes that will spur app development by third parties.
04-28-2017, 09:04 AM   #56
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QuoteOriginally posted by geomez Quote
Anybody know what that last bullet point is about Android phones?
Bluetooth Theta streaming Facebook Live while your Samsung is in your pocket

on XDA theres some expectation that next Android 8 will include secondary BLE device management
04-28-2017, 12:25 PM   #57
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QuoteOriginally posted by johnmflores Quote
It sounds like the Theta 4K is actually running Android and that Ricoh hopes that will spur app development by third parties.
That sounds like a stretch to me. The heart of the Android experience is their GUI. IDK how that ls a logical developmental or selling point to run Android on a screenless device.
04-28-2017, 04:43 PM - 1 Like   #58
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QuoteOriginally posted by geomez Quote
That sounds like a stretch to me. The heart of the Android experience is their GUI. IDK how that ls a logical developmental or selling point to run Android on a screenless device.
The face of the Android experience is the GUI. The heart is the code that interfaces with all the hardware. My understanding is that Android is open source, so similar to how phone vendors can skin Android with their own identity and apps, I imagine that Ricoh can "skin" Android to the Theta's specific UX needs (no screen, buttons) and basically write the Theta app as an Android app.

Why bother? Because there are thousands of Android developers out there. In comparison, how many Theta developers are there? If Ricoh manages to make this happen (I wonder what kind of SOC and battery the 4K has?) then in one fell swoop they've made it easier for thousands of developers to create Theta apps using development tools that they already use AND provide an easy means of app delivery via the Google Play Store.

(I'm only technical enough to be dangerous. I hope a dev can step in here...)

p.s. more info
http://lists.theta360.guide/t/theta-to-support-4k-video-spatial-audio-and-op...?u=codetricity
04-28-2017, 05:54 PM   #59
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QuoteOriginally posted by johnmflores Quote
The face of the Android experience is the GUI. The heart is the code that interfaces with all the hardware. My understanding is that Android is open source, so similar to how phone vendors can skin Android with their own identity and apps, I imagine that Ricoh can "skin" Android to the Theta's specific UX needs (no screen, buttons) and basically write the Theta app as an Android app.

Why bother? Because there are thousands of Android developers out there. In comparison, how many Theta developers are there? If Ricoh manages to make this happen (I wonder what kind of SOC and battery the 4K has?) then in one fell swoop they've made it easier for thousands of developers to create Theta apps using development tools that they already use AND provide an easy means of app delivery via the Google Play Store.

(I'm only technical enough to be dangerous. I hope a dev can step in here...)

p.s. more info
THETA to Support 4K Video, Spatial Audio and Open Camera OS - Events - THETA 360 Developer
You may be right John we'll have to wait and see.
04-28-2017, 08:01 PM - 1 Like   #60
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Im going to guess here that the Theta does not have a android based OS, otherwise we would be seeing the source GPL'd. However it does contain code that connects to the Open Spherical Camera API and Camera 2.0 API, which would allow to manually change certain parameters like speed,ISO,RAW manipulation,tethering and video output via a android client.
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