Looking at the Nikon KeyMission

- If you paid much attention to the 360 or VR camera market, you might recognize these two gizmos. This is a Ricoh Theta, this is a Nikon KeyMission, these are both 360 cameras. Press a button and they take a spherical image, either a still image or a video. You can then view that spherical image using googles or you can pan about it on your mobile device or even on your computer. If you've been hanging around here, the practicing photographer, very much then you've probably seen me using the Theta, we did an entire course on the Theta, we did another VR course that featured the Theta very heavily, the KeyMission is the second VR camera that I've gotten to use pretty extensively and I want to talk a little bit about it just in case you've been wondering about this camera but more importantly, now having worked a lot with a second camera, I'm starting to get an idea of the kinds of features and things you might want to look for when you're shopping for a camera.

We're going to talk a little bit about that right now. The first big difference between the KeyMission and the Theta is simple ruggedness and durability. This is meant to be an action camera, this is meant to be a 360 GoPro for want of a better term. This thing is water proof, it's cold proof, it's very rugged, it's got this cool silicone case and it's very easy to turn on. In fact, that's one of the cool things about this camera, is all you have to do is set it somewhere, press the button and it automatically powers up and starts recording a video.

It's doing that right now. It's recording a full 360 degree video and it will do that until I press the button again at which point it stops and after 30 seconds it shuts itself down, you can change that sleep interval if you want. Similarly, there's a button over here on the side that if I press it, it automatically powers up and takes a still image. That's some nice, easy functionality, it allows me to get the thing into place very quickly, turn it on, particularly for an action camera I think that's important. If you've got this bolted to the front of your surfboard, you don't want to be messing too much with tiny little buttons, which is what the Theta has, the buttons on the Theta are recessed and they're flat, they're very small, this would be a difficult thing to use with gloves on, I've used this on my motorcycle before with riding gloves on and I can start it and stop it.

It's well thought out in terms of its application as an action camera. This is a camera meant to be bolted on through its regular tripod socket here to any number of odd locations. Outside of airplanes and fronts of cameras and surfboards and motorcycles and all that kind of stuff. It is a intelligently designed action camera but one that shoots an entire sphere. By comparison, the Theta, which is a little bit smaller and lighter, is certainly something you can get into a lot of different locations but it is not water proof, it's not ruggedized, and it doesn't have the centralized mass that this thing has, so it's a little bit harder to get it mounted in ways that allow it to shoot stable footage.

There are some big technical differences between these two cameras. The KeyMission shoots many more pixels than the Theta. It shoots 4K, and there's actually a little 4K badge here on the side. It's very important that you understand that just because it's shooting 4K, that doesn't mean you expect 4K quality from it. In fact, both of these cameras shoot final video that looks less detaily, looks like it's lower resolution than what you would get out of a GoPro or another action camera because it's taking those 4,000 pixels, and rather than spreading them across just a rectangle, it's stretching them out over an entire sphere.

You're not getting the pixel density out of this camera or the lower pixel count Theta, you're not getting the pixel density that you get out of a dedicated camera so 4K on this means something pretty different than a 4K video camera. Still, this captures more pixels which should mean that it captures better detail and sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. I don't know if that's compression differences, lens differences, what, in general I can't say that there's a tremendous improvement in image quality in the KeyMission over the Theta due to all of its pixels.

A lot of times I feel like the Theta does a better job image quality wise. It certainly does a better job in low light than the KeyMission does. It's still weak in low light but it's better than the KeyMission. If you want flexibility, if you want the ability to shoot in low light then you might be better off with the Theta. There's a curious difference in the way that these two cameras choose to map what they capture onto that virtual sphere that they're creating when they make a VR. I find far more visible seams with the KeyMission than I do with the Theta, and sometimes, depending on what my final application is the seams can fall in a really bad place and leave me with unusable footage.

That's not a total deal breaker, it just means you need to learn where the seams in this image are and you need to be careful about how you have the camera oriented towards your subject when you're shooting. If there's something that you know you want the maximum fidelity on and you know that that's where the viewer's attention is going to mostly be, make sure the camera is oriented so that you don't have a seam on it. Same is true for the Theta but not to the same degree. The seams on the KeyMission are much more noticeable and that might simply be a fact of its width. There's a lot more space between its two 180 degree lenses than there is with the Theta, which is much thinner, and that might be part of the reason for their weird oblong form factor here is they're trying to get more of a seamless 360 and I would say they've achieved that.

There's another big difference which may not matter to you, but one of the things that I loved about the Theta, and this was a big surprise, is I'm having a ball using it not for shooting VR's, but for shooting still images. When it takes a picture, what it stores is an unwrapped spherical image. Something like this. I love using this to shoot people sitting at a table, because you get these great last supper images. That's everyone sitting all the way around the table, they've all been put in this line. When I try to do the same thing with the KeyMission, I get this, there's again my visible seams, it's just a weird image.

The stills that you get directly out of this camera are not so usable. Now, for a regular 360 application, that doesn't matter at all but here at the Practicing Photographer, we mostly talk about still photography and so that's what I've mostly been using the Theta for. If you like that functionality in the Theta, you're not going to get that in this camera but still, for the most part, it's almost six and one half dozen of another in terms of image quality with these cameras. Neither of them are fantastic, and that's just because the state of the art right now is for lower res, lower quality video than what we're used to out of even our cell phone cameras, what's cool about these cameras is they're 360s.

That's going to improve over time but for now, these are probably pretty similar. Again, the Theta scores a little bit in low light. Where things really get different is if you want to use your smartphone as an interface to these cameras, both cameras have a smartphone app that runs in tandem with them, communicates with the devices over their own built in wi-fi networks and with that software, you can have a viewfinder, you can make changes to the settings on the camera and so on and so forth. You might be wondering why I'm not showing you that piece of software and that's because the software for the Nikon KeyMission is in my opinion almost unusable.

It right now is just too clunky in the way that it interfaces with the camera. I was going to show you how you pair the cameras but I was afraid I couldn't get it to work again. I had to go watch two different YouTube videos to learn how to do this, I had to read a couple of forum posts. As near as I can tell, everyone has trouble pairing this camera, at least everyone is reporting online. I'd finally gotten it working but even with it working, it's incredibly unreliable. Every time I use the camera with the smartphone interface, I end up losing at least a still or a video because it's lost connection to the camera.

Sometimes I miss the shot that I'm wanting to get because it's taking too long to get the software working. It's just really not usable. Now, you don't have to use the software. As I said, the camera works just fine by putting it down and just pressing the button on top. Because this is a 360 camera, you don't need to frame a shot, it's shooting everything. The lack of a smartphone interface is not a deal breaker, however, that's your only interface for setting settings on the camera, and there are times when it really is nice to have a viewfinder just to be sure that things are level and to get a better idea of really what you're capturing.

Hopefully, Nikon is going to improve that because right now it's incredibly frustrating. I said before that partly what I've learned is that there are some criteria you can look for when you're shopping for a 360 camera. First, as when you're shopping with any piece of gear, is going to be price. These come in at roughly the same price category. There are one or two products out there that are a little bit cheaper and there are some products that are ghastly more expensive but that's kind of a different market. You probably wouldn't even consider those. Start with price, next, ask yourself what kind of stuff are you going to shoot.

If you are going to go mountain biking down a glacier or something like that, you're going to want the more rugged KeyMission, it's just that simple. The Theta would not be a good solution for that. You're going to work to find a mount for any of these cameras that's going to work in different kinds of situations depending on how much vibration you get but still, just durability alone, the KeyMission is going to be better for those action camera kind of things. If you want the most flexibility for the most lighting situations, I would say the Theta is a better choice. If you like the ability of shooting unmapped spherical still images, the Theta is a better choice but most importantly, if you want the best software, if you want to not be frustrated by trying to control the camera with your phone, if you want some of the cool features that you can get from the Theta software it's just a much better way to go than the Nikon.

There are some really great features locked away in here. It can do hyper lapse, it can do time lapse, a lot of other stuff. When I've gotten it to work it works very well but it's pulling hair out of my head to try and get it to work and that just gets very frustrating. By the time you watch this, maybe it will be fixed. Check some reviews and see if people are saying whether the software has been improved. If you're just going to stick it on a surfboard and shoot that way, then the phone interface isn't that important so maybe it doesn't matter. Some other things to consider when you're shopping, pixel count, yes it matters but it doesn't matter to the degree that it does when you're shooting with a still camera, or it doesn't matter in the same way because again, that number of pixels is spread over a larger area.

Try to download some demo files in different kinds of lighting, spin them around, look at them, that's going to be the best way to assess image quality. Trying to judge image quality from the specs of a 360 camera is really hard to do because the specs just mean something completely different. Finally, you'll want to consider the ordinary things that you look for in a camera. How's the battery life? What else is in the box and that sort of thing. These are small batteries. They mostly have about the same capacity so there's not a big difference there.

This is an industry in its infancy right now. These products are only going to get better. These are both good places to start. It's fun to see what's possible. It's fun to kind of be on the cutting edge there as we all try to figure out what is the visual vocabulary of these devices? What can they be used for? Either of these are a good place to start but I can't wait to see what's coming in the future.