When square sensors have become the industry-wide consensus, DJI Osmo 360 II once again explores the upper limit of panoramic imaging.

On the evening of August 13, DJI launched its second-generation panoramic camera, the Osmo 360 II.

A year ago, the first-generation Osmo 360 entered the market with the industry's pioneering square sensor, bringing native 8K to panoramic video for the very first time. One year later, the Osmo 360 II pushes this underlying capability a major step forward: a brand-new imaging platform purpose-built for 8K/60fps, a fully upgraded full imaging pipeline, and a complete set of intelligent features that enable users to "get publish-ready footage immediately after shooting".

This is no regular parameter upgrade. If the first-generation model answered the question of "whether DJI can build a flagship panoramic camera", now that square sensors have been adopted by an increasing number of manufacturers and become the new default of this product category, what the Osmo 360 II aims to answer is a much more difficult question: how high can a company with a full-stack imaging technology capability push this long-niche panoramic track to reach?

A square sensor that rewrites the default benchmark of an entire segment

The appeal of panoramic cameras is never hard to understand: ordinary cameras can only record the area in front of the lens, while panoramic cameras can capture the entire world around you. But for a very long time, it has remained a niche category — many users bought one, shot a few clips, then left it idle for being "unfriendly to use".

DJI conducted a large number of user interviews before launching the project, and the conclusions centered on two points: first, the output footage is blurry, especially after reframing in post-production, the content becomes unrecognizable; second, post-processing is overly complicated. Shooting is a pleasant experience, but users have to adjust the viewing angle frame by frame when they get home, which is so slow that people lose their patience.

"Blurriness" and "operational difficulty" have kept panoramic cameras out of the mainstream market.

The root cause of blurriness lies in the underlying components. The head of DJI's handheld imaging division explained that the vast majority of panoramic cameras on the market use 4:3 rectangular sensors designed for smartphones and conventional cameras, while panoramic imaging only uses the middle circular area that can be inscribed. Nearly a quarter of the area on both sides does not participate in imaging, but wastes volume, power consumption and cost. The chips also follow smartphone solutions, and the top specification of smartphone chips is around 4K/120fps, which translates exactly to 8K/30fps for panoramic throughput.

Therefore, to squeeze out the maximum throughput, the industry has come up with a strange resolution of 5.7K/60fps. It is no one's fault, but the product of the category's long-term "compromise" with general-purpose supply chains, and no one has tried to change it for years. For most manufacturers, this is almost the only cost-effective choice: customizing dedicated components for a still-niche category means several times more R&D cycles, manpower and capital investment, as well as risks with almost no precedent to follow. In a hardware market where rapid iteration is the norm, this calculation is hardly worth it.

DJI's approach is to return to the physical nature of imaging: since panoramic imaging only uses a circular area, there is no need to compromise on a rectangular sensor with blank areas on both sides. Three years ago, DJI pioneered a 1-inch equivalent panoramic imaging square sensor in the industry, removed the wasted areas on both sides, and allowed the circular image field to be fully inscribed, increasing the effective utilization rate of the sensor by about a quarter. It also redistributed the pixels, adjusted the vertical resolution from 3K to 4K, and finally achieved dual-lens native 4K+4K=8K without upsampling, while retaining large 2.4μm pixels. The first-generation Osmo 360 thus pushed panoramic imaging from "capturing everything" to "capturing sharp content".

A more thought-provoking change happened later: this square sensor that was once considered "thankless" began to be followed by the whole industry.

When talking about how to view peers adopting the same design idea, the head of DJI's handheld imaging division did not regard it as a competition of victory or defeat. He prefers to talk about another thing: competing for market share in a still tiny market has limited significance. What really determines whether this category can grow is whether someone can solve the two fundamental problems of "blurriness" and "operational difficulty".

"If no one steps forward to tackle these fundamental problems, but only launches products with new appearances and gimmicks, and keeps spinning around in the existing market size, there will be no progress for the entire industry."

This also responds to a frequently misinterpreted question: is pushing the upper limit of image quality and performance to satisfy a small number of enthusiasts, or to make more users feel comfortable using it? From DJI's perspective, the answer is the latter. The reason why panoramic cameras cannot reach the mass market is precisely "blurriness" and "operational difficulty". To ensure the picture remains sharp after reframing in post-production, higher native resolution is the essential foundation. To let users avoid spending an hour editing after shooting, sufficient computing power is required to support intelligent framing and automatic clip generation.

Without pushing the upper limit higher, popularization is impossible. "When we design products, we do not put product specifications and parameters on the top of our priority list," he said. Compared with a more impressive number on the spec sheet, he cares more about whether a solution can truly improve user experience.

The confidence of the leader comes from a 12-year-long journey

It is no accident that DJI can quickly lead the standard in a category where it "arrived late". Looking back over a longer timeline, panoramic imaging is just the latest output of its 12 years of accumulation in imaging technology.

Since the launch of the Osmo series, DJI's handheld imaging business has followed two parallel paths. One path focuses on professional scenarios: from the first-generation Ronin, to the Ronin 2 that can stably support cinema cameras, to the Ronin-S and DJI RS that bring cinema-level stabilization to mirrorless cameras, all the way to the highly integrated Ronin 4D. With this product line, DJI has for the first time transformed from a "tool provider" to a "workflow leader". The value of this stabilization technology is backed by two high-profile industry recognitions: the Ronin series won an Emmy Award in 2024, and the Academy Scientific and Technical Award in 2025.

The other path embraces mass consumers: in 2015, the Osmo created the integrated handheld gimbal camera category. The Osmo Pocket put flagship imaging performance in users' pockets, and the Osmo Action pioneered the front screen for action cameras, making selfie shooting and monitoring much more convenient.

These technical accumulations are not limited to their own product lines. When DJI decided to develop panoramic cameras, it could directly call on a full set of proven imaging capabilities that had been tested repeatedly.

Specific to panoramic imaging, DJI's path is not built from scratch. "DJI's exploration of panoramic imaging is a coherent technical accumulation process," DJI's spokesperson summarized. From the stitching algorithm on drones, to the industry's first square CMOS for the first-generation panoramic camera, to the Avata 360 that verified the stability of stitching, every step has laid the foundation for today's Osmo 360 II.

The earliest panoramic stitching algorithm was actually polished on drones. The panoramic photos taken by drones need to stitch multiple frames into a complete image covering the whole sky and ground under conditions of high altitude, strong wind, and continuous movement of the fuselage, which requires extremely high algorithm stability. The real foundation of panoramic imaging was laid in the sky.

Later, this capability was migrated to handheld devices, and together with the square sensor, gave birth to the first-generation Osmo 360.

The launch of the Avata 360 panoramic drone then brought the algorithm back to the sky for a round of extreme testing: in the footage of FPV drones flying through holes, walls and windows, stitching flaws between close and distant scenes are extremely easy to expose. Solving these problems one by one under high-intensity flight conditions has prepared a solution for high-speed ground scenarios in advance.

More importantly, it can truly restore various motion states at low, medium and high speeds, providing the algorithm with a complete set of samples that are difficult to obtain from ground scenarios.

In this sense, although the Osmo 360 II is only the second-generation product of the Osmo 360 series, it is already equipped with the third-generation panoramic imaging technology. With the algorithm foundation built on drones, and two rounds of optimization from the first-generation Osmo 360 and the Avata 360 panoramic drone, the three lines of sensor image quality, stitching algorithm and intelligent experience are fully utilized for the first time in this generation.

Upgrades of the Osmo 360 II: from higher parameters to qualitative leap in experience

If DJI set the industry standard with its first-generation panoramic camera, the Osmo 360 II aims to prove how far the potential of this standard can be unleashed.

The upgrade starts with the imaging platform. The Osmo 360 II is equipped with a new generation of imaging platform specially built for panoramic use, which is designed from the ground up to achieve 8K/60fps. Some players in the industry adopt the solution of stacking multiple chips to increase computing power, but that is usually a makeshift approach due to insufficient single-chip computing power. This dedicated chip takes all panoramic requirements into consideration from the very beginning of design, eliminating the trouble of resource contention and coordination costs between multiple chips.

Why insist on achieving 8K/60fps? A practical reason is that this is a path that other manufacturers have no incentive to take.

"For consumer imaging devices, being able to shoot 4K/120fps is already very high. To achieve 8K/60fps additionally, you have to pay a huge cost of chip area, which makes the input-output ratio not cost-effective," said the head of DJI's handheld imaging division. "But if DJI does not work on this, few manufacturers in the industry will move in this direction."

60fps is far more than just 10 frames more than 50fps: most smartphones, tablets and computers today have 60Hz or 120Hz high refresh rate screens. When playing 50fps footage, the system has to interpolate one frame for every 5 frames, which causes subtle stutters that are extremely noticeable to eyes that are used to high refresh rates.

8K/60fps makes panoramic footage play smoothly on mainstream screens for the first time. With the improvement of computing power, a series of capabilities are also enhanced accordingly: slow motion is upgraded from 4K/100fps on the previous generation to 240fps at 240fps, static time-lapse is upgraded from 8K to 16K, and the performance of time-freeze and HDR photos is also more robust thanks to the surplus computing power.

Another point that required repeated trade-offs is the 14.5-stop dynamic range. The native DCG upper limit of the sensor itself is about 13.5 stops. The reason why the Osmo 360 II can push panoramic HDR to 14.5 stops is that the two front and rear lenses shoot with independent exposure: when the user holds the camera on a selfie stick, one side needs to ensure proper exposure of the user's face, while the other side may face a bright sky. By setting appropriate exposure for both sides, the layers of the picture can be retained at the same time. The difficulty lies in that once the exposure difference increases, the brightness and color of the overlapping areas will be difficult to match seamlessly during post-stitching.

"The 14.5 number is not set arbitrarily — it is not 15, 16 or 17, but the balance point we found after repeated trade-offs between dynamic range and stitching fusion performance," he recalled. Until one month before the release, the team was still testing different exposure combinations, looking for the critical point that can expand the dynamic range while ensuring the picture is stitched cleanly. This is a very restrained choice: we will not sacrifice the more important performance of seamless stitching for a more impressive spec number.

There are also many detailed optimizations. The second-generation ultra-hard diamond coating on the lens can withstand 2000 times of steel wool friction tests. Starting from this generation, users can replace the lens by themselves without sending the device back to the service center — this is a very practical improvement for cycling and skiing users whose lenses are prone to bumps.

Weight reduction is another unnoticeable but critical optimization. Panoramic cameras are mostly mounted on selfie sticks, so every extra gram of the fuselage will be amplified by the lever effect. Many sports users also like to fix the camera on the helmet or chin, and a heavier center of gravity will cause the device to sag and block the view. To make the lens that covers such a large image field lighter, the team widely uses glass-plastic hybrid aspherical lenses to achieve overall weight reduction while ensuring resolution. With a short and thick fuselage design that lowers the center of gravity, the final weight of the whole device is only 183 grams.

All these "full utilization" of capabilities point to one thing: when square sensors become the consensus of the industry, what really differentiates products is no longer who owns the sensor, but who can maximize its potential.

No missed shots, no complicated framing: when professional content creation becomes accessible to all

An inherent feature of panoramic cameras is that they do not record a pre-framed picture, but the entire scene. Users do not need to determine the lens direction before pressing the record button, and the framing can be decided afterwards. This is the most charming part of panoramic cameras, but also the part that has long made users easily discouraged.

The head of DJI's handheld imaging division has a sharp judgment: the reason why panoramic cameras have long lagged behind action cameras and pocket cameras is that they rely too much on "blind shooting" — all the work after shooting is left to post-production, which becomes a pure burden for users. "Normally people hope to finish editing and get a clip within 15 minutes, but panoramic editing often takes half an hour or even an hour."

The solution of the Osmo 360 II is to let the camera complete the work of framing and motion control first. When you press record under the newly added "Subject Follow" mode, the camera will automatically lock the human face in the 360° view, and record the motion control and framing into the footage at the same time. If you have registered a specific face, it will prioritize tracking you. After shooting, connect to the App, and you can export a flat video that always follows the subject with one tap, no need to slide and select frame by frame.

It does not lose the flexibility of panoramic imaging at the same time: the entire 360° space is still fully recorded. If you want the front, left or right viewing angle, you can spend a little effort to extract it in post. In addition, the audio highlight function can automatically tag footage by identifying sound clues such as laughter and cheers, and directly locate the highlight scenes in the material. The AI creative template also allows users to quickly generate publish-ready clips after importing the footage. These features make post-production much easier, compressing the editing process that used to require experience and a lot of time into just a few steps.

"It is equivalent to having a 360-degree follow-shot director." From the perspective of DJI's handheld imaging