Insta360 X6

Price and Availability

• Standard bundle costs £619 and Essentials Bundle is £709
• Launched worldwide on 12 August 2026

The X6 is available now, starting at £619 for the Standard bundle, which gets you the camera itself, one battery, a USB-C cable, a protective pouch and a lens cloth – nothing else. One tier up is the Essentials Bundle, costing £709 and throwing in a second Xtreme battery, a 114cm invisible selfie stick, a rubber lens cap, a fast-charge case and an extended warranty. If you’re planning to use most of that lot anyway, I’d say it’s worth the jump.

Whichever bundle you choose, there’s a significant price rise over the Insta360 X5, which launched at £519.99, as well as a notable gap between the X6 and its closest rivals: the DJI Osmo 360 starts at £409.99, the GoPro Max 2 at £449.99. However you slice it, the X6 is now the most expensive small 360 camera you can buy, and it’s not particularly close.

There’s one more cost worth factoring in if you want to use that class-leading waterproofing to its full 60m depth: Insta360’s official dive case will set you back a further £158.99.

Design and Build

• 196g and a squarer shape than the X4 and X5
• 2.32-inch OLED touchscreen with pressure-sensitive controls
• IP68-rated and waterproof to 20m unhoused 

The X6’s boxier shape compared with its predecessors comes down to what’s inside it: a pair of larger 1/1.1-inch sensors that need plenty of room. That extra width has been put to good use elsewhere too, with a bigger 2.32-inch OLED screen that now supports an always-on mode, an improvement over previous X-series displays.

Insta360 has also added a pressure-sensitive layer to that screen, requiring a firmer press to reach certain settings. It’s a neat idea on paper, but in three weeks of use I never felt it added much in the way of functionality – it’s the sort of feature that sounds better in a spec sheet than it feels in the hand.

Mounting options carry over unchanged from the X5: a standard tripod thread plus Insta360’s own magnetic clip on the base, with adapters available for GoPro-style mounts. I ran the X6 on the bundled selfie stick for walking and cycling footage, and on a SmallRig suction mount for car-based shots, and had no complaints with either setup.

Where the X6 really pulls ahead of its rivals is underwater – somewhere I haven’t had the chance to test it yet. Waterproof to 20m without any housing at all, and 60m with Insta360’s official dive case, it leaves the DJI Osmo 360’s 10m rating – and DJI’s own reluctance to recommend submersion at all – trailing well behind, and comfortably beats the GoPro Max 2’s 5m limit too. If you want to take a 360 camera deep underwater, the X6 is currently the best option around.

Insta360 also claims the X6’s lenses are five times more scratch-resistant than the X5’s, and cheaper to replace when they do get damaged: £20.99 for one lens, £27.99 for both. I didn’t manage to put a mark on mine over the review period, so I can’t vouch for the scratch-resistance claim directly, but the replacement process itself is unchanged from the X5 and remains refreshingly simple, with everything you need included in the kit.

Storage is worth a mention here too, because it caught me out: alongside the microSD slot, the X6 has 47GB of usable built-in storage, which sounds generous until you remember how quickly 8K footage eats through it. I’ll get into exactly how quickly in the performance section below, but the short version is: you’ll likely want a fast, high-capacity microSD card.

Battery Life and Performance

• Rated for 140 minutes at 8K/30fps; I recorded 136 minutes in testing
• 0 to 80% charge in around 24 minutes, which held up in practice
• 8K footage uses roughly 1GB of storage per minute of recording

Battery life is an area where Insta360’s claims and my real-world testing lined up almost exactly. The 2600mAh Xtreme battery is rated for 140 minutes of continuous 8K/30fps recording (a 50% jump over the X5’s battery life) and I got an impressive 136 minutes out of it before it gave up. I also never had it overheat, despite testing through a really hot stretch of English summer, which is more than I can say for some rivals.

Insta360 markets the X6 as three cameras in one: a 360 shooter, a single-lens action cam, and a subject-tracking vlogging mode. In reality, I used the 360 mode almost exclusively – the X6’s bulk makes it a slightly awkward action camera next to something like a GoPro Hero or even Insta360’s own Ace Pro 2. The vlogging mode is more convincing, though: InstaFrame 2.0 does a good job of mimicking a gimbal, keeping a subject centred, level and steady no matter how the camera itself is oriented, and you set your subject with nothing more than a double-tap on the screen.

The headline new software feature is AI Director, which quietly edits your footage into a rough vlog overnight on the X6 itself while the camera charges, ready to review – and tweak – in the morning. It’s a genuinely appealing idea, but as I’ll cover next, getting it to work reliably wasn’t always straightforward.

As I mentioned earlier, the X6’s 8K footage requires a lot of storage space. At 30fps, it requires around 1GB per minute, so that 47GB of built-in storage empties fast. So you should budget for a high-speed, large-capacity microSD card if you’re planning to shoot at the top resolution for any length of time.

Software and Apps

• Insta360 app comes with AI editing features but frequently crashed in testing
• Desktop Studio app is far more reliable, but lacks AI auto-editing
• Colour profiles like I-Log and Dolby Vision can only be set on the camera

This is where the X6’s polish drops off a bit. I tested the beta mobile app on an iPhone 13 and a OnePlus Pad, and on the iPhone especially it struggled – crashing repeatedly during anything more demanding than basic playback, export included. Insta360’s guidance points to an iPhone 15 as the minimum for reliable performance, which feels like a big ask when plenty of people, myself included, aren’t replacing their phone every year or two.

The OnePlus Pad coped better, and let me try AI-assisted editing of individual clips – results were decent, if not quite up to a proper manual edit, and longer clips took a noticeable while to churn through. I couldn’t get the app’s automatic multi-clip stitching feature to work at all on either device: it crashed the iPhone app outright and simply wouldn’t accept clips on Android.

There’s also no way to switch colour profiles when using the mobile app as a remote control, which is a small but annoying omission – if you want to shoot in I-Log or Dolby Vision rather than the standard profile, that change has to be made on the camera itself. That’s awkward if, say, the X6 is mounted on a long selfie stick or somewhere else you can’t easily reach, which was the case for a chunk of my testing.

The desktop Insta360 Studio app, run on my M2 MacBook Air, was a different story – stable throughout, if lighter on features. There are no AI editing tools here, but I found the manual editing tools a lot easier to work with than they are on a phone screen. I was also able to export finished clips straight from the X6 to my SSD without moving the raw files first, which saved a lot of hassle given how much space 8K footage takes up. Given the mobile app’s rockiness during my review period, I’d lean on the desktop tool until Insta360 has had a chance to iron things out post-launch. Hopefully, the public app on release day is in better shape than the beta versions I was using for this review.

Image and Video Quality

• Dual 1/1.1-inch sensors, up from 1/1.28-inch on the X5
• 360 video now tops out at 8K/50fps, up from 8K/30fps
• 10-bit colour now available in every mode, including PureVideo low light

The X6’s larger sensors give it roughly a third more sensor area than the X5, and around four times the light-gathering ability per frame. The frame-rate ceiling in 360 mode is now 8K/50fps, up from 30fps, while photo resolution climbs to 120MP in 360 shots and 42MP shooting flat.

In good light, I wouldn’t overstate the difference between X5 and X6 footage – it’s there, but it’s a refinement rather than a giant leap. What’s more notable is AdaptiveTone 2.0, which blends two exposures per frame and handles bright skies and high-contrast scenes better than any previous Insta360 camera I’ve tested. I’d previously have called the GoPro Max 2 the daylight leader in this category; after testing the X6, I think that’s no longer clear-cut, and it may well have taken over.

It’s after dark that the gap really opens up. PureVideo was already a strong low-light mode on the X5, and the combination of bigger sensors and 10-bit colour now running through every mode – PureVideo included – pushes noise down noticeably further still. Neither the Osmo 360’s SuperNight mode nor the Max 2, which has no dedicated low-light mode at all, comes anywhere close. For twilight and nighttime shooting, the X6 is by far the best 360 camera I’ve tested.

Where I’d once have pointed daylight shooters at the Max 2 and night shooters at the X5, I can now just point everyone at the X6. It really is a do-it-all 360 camera.

Audio deserves a mention here too: the X6 has a new 360-degree windproof mic array, plus a dedicated hidden mic aimed specifically at motorcyclists, cutting wind noise and clarifying engine sound. It’s a niche addition, but a thoughtful one if it applies to you. The built-in wind filter works, though not completely – for genuinely clean audio in blustery conditions, I’d pair the X6 with Insta360’s Mic Pro, which I also tested and found excellent.

Should you buy it?