The 16-GoPro rig isn't for a home user, it's for YouTube channel owners and other video publishers who are making money from their videos and want some more immersive content.

Well, I guess my point is that this is a bit overkill. A professional content producer may want higher quality than consumer gopro cameras.

Whereas a home user (who may also want to create such immersive content) is left out in the lurch.

Well I'm sure you'll be able to one day have a rig of 16 RED Epic cameras and crunch through all the 6K videos, but plenty of neat scenes can be recorded with the current version. 16 GoPros aren't cheap (though this could be quite a nice package for a rental shop), but all-in will still be quite a bit cheaper than just one RED Epic body (without lens!).

i don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.

lots of special-interest (cars, outdoors, extreme sports, etc.) youtube channels are filmed primarily on gopro rigs (suction-mounted, body-mounted, drone-mounted, etc.) and they make millions of dollars of revenue.

"professional" means a lot of different things. the content production market is massive and very profitable.

My brother makes professional videos on his phone, as well as a RED camera. It entirely depends on what he's trying to do, and what the people paying for it are looking for.

with a 90 degree FOV (such as oculus) you are looking at the feed from 4 go pros at any moment. the hero 3+ does 4K, so you're reducing four 4K feeds into a single 1080p/2 (oculus DK2) feed.

When you're going from 33 megapixels to 1 megapixel, i'm not sure how much optics is going to matter...

Gopro's are what $400? That'd be $6400, which yeah may be out of the price range of your average consumer but my brother who does film work will routinely spend more than $2000 on a lens. If there is a market for these kind of videos, then it's a drop in the bucket.

If you want a cheaper 360 degree camera, consider looking at the RICOH Theta, which retails for $300 on Amazon:

https://theta360.com/en/

http://www.amazon.com/Ricoh-Theta-Degree-Spherical-Panorama/...

xiaomi's sports camera is about $70, gopro's cost is about the same I guess

> gopro's cost is about the same I guess

The GoPro Hero4 costs $400.

But the GoPro Hero is only $130 and is physically the same size.

And the lower resolution and features probably don't matter when you stitching together 16 streams.

The first GoPro is garbage. I have one, and I have the 3+ one. The first one is noisy, has horrible compression, absolutely horrible at low light, doesn't shoot 4K, doesn't do 60fps at 1080p.

> The first GoPro is garbage [...] doesn't shoot 4K, doesn't do 60fps at 1080p.

Truly we live in the future. If you told me even 15 years ago these would be legitimate complaints for a sub-$200 camera I would have called you crazy.

15 years is an eternity in technology. Check out the processors from 2000, they are all garbage by every reasonable metric. They are only good as heaters now.

talking about cost here, not price. gopro is way over-priced.