It kind of surprises me that there is hardly any support from Mapillary.com on hardware. Especially wrt 360 cameras. There are quite a lot of us looking for a 360 camera that is OK to use with Mapillary and has specs accordingly. Nobody wants to be the early adopter to find out that the camera you bought just does not work fine with Mapillary. I was one when I bought the Xiaomi Misphere. Specs seemed OK but in practice the camera cannot shoot in 2 second interval (although specs say so) and the image stabilisation on timelapse images does not work properly.
Since a couple of weeks the Insta 360 One X is out. The camera looks promising but I am not going to buy this one until I know it works OK for Mapillary.
It would be great if Mapillary would buy one and give a review on how this camera works for the Mapillary workflow. If the people at Mapillary do not have time I (and I guess many others) would be more than willing to review for them but as said … I am not going to spend 459 euro to find out that this camera does not meet my requirements.
mapillary is a special corner case for most of the cameras.
In general: if a camera supports writing GPS to the image and let you create pictures in intervalls of 1+x sec, it is good to create pictures for mapillary.
To run the mapillary app on it, it needs a bit more.
I agree with @peewee32 . It would greatly benefit and support the volunteers if Mapillary could buy and evaluate some of the cameras available and validate their suitability for us.
@Amiga4000 The fact that a camera does not record GPS data is not really a problem for me because with fotogeotag that is a problem that is solved in post in a matter of minutes time. I just want to know what it is like for the entire workflow and that means that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I give some more info on my experience with the Misphere.
The specs of the Xiaomi Misphere has a 2 second interval (timelapse) and image stabilisation but in real life it just does not work. 2 seconds is more like 4 and images taken from a bicycle helmet just do not all show a level horizon. Another problem is that not all settings are stored in the camera. If I switch the camera on I have to use the phone app to set it to interval mode and choose the 2 second interval. So this camera can not be used for Mapillary timeslapse without a smartphone.
360 images need to stitch the 2 spheres. This is most of the time done in post on a computer but in the beginning this computer app was very unstable. It took my many attempts to stitch the thousands of images I normally take.
Also in first firmware versions of the camera it would just stop recording every now and then.
Uploading the images via the python script has never worked for me. That was strange because uploading images for my other action cam used to work just fine.
So what I actually mean is that you really need to try all these things (and many more) before you know if it is going to work for you or not. That is why it would be nice if Mapillary would just try some popular cameras and give a review.
With the Xiaomi Misphere that I have, it is storing all the settings properly. I have read other reviews were others were mentioning this problem. I have never experienced this, I suspect the problem was fixed in an update before I got mine.
@Jaku103 Thanks for reporting this. I guess this issue most have been fixed in the later firmware versions. The problem with these later version is that the 2 second timelapes is more like 4 seconds. That is the reason I still use the beta version I received from Xiaomi’s Jason Wang. That version has a true 2 second interval (more or less). I reported on this earlier in the xiaomi thread. Since I find the 2 second interval more important then the storing of settings I just leave the beta version on the camera.