The 360-degree camera is an amazing thing, and Ricoh is the pioneering company behind a key part of the technology that helps achieve this. A technology, by the way, that rumors suggest certain other brands might be wising up to (but I'll get to that in a moment). That means when we see their own 360-degree camera massively discounted it's very much worth looking at.
Who, though, is it for? Not everyone any more. I maintain a guide to the best 360-degree cameras and many of the latest are action-focused, like the amazing (and still cheaper) Insta360 X4. The Theta X, though, does have a lot of merit, especially for certain workflows, and the price reductions are tempting.
So, I'd argue that the big selling point for the Theta X 360 is the fact it seems to capture, in our tests, such good still images and has features that make it easy to set up and get pictures for VR-style photos – the kind of thing that you can feed into a virtual walkthrough if you're an estate agent or creating a virtual museum tour.
Where I'm less certain, in this day and age, that I'd suggest it – even at this discounted price – is in a head-to-head against the now leading brand in 360-degree cameras Insta360. That's because that company also took Ricoh's initiative and cleverly arranged the lenses back-to-back (which means stitching is better than on, say, the GoPro Max).
Insta360, though, seem to have invested more effort in reaching 'the average consumer' so – for most people – they will get all the joy of an action camera in either the Insta360 X3 (the model which came along after this Theta X), which can get video at 5.7K and a similar photo resolution, or the even more powerful and newer X4 which can capture video at 8K.
That X4 - the 8K model – is still pretty new this Black Friday season, so it's not heavily discounted in our black friday GoPro (and action camera) guide, but it's still cheaper than this, and the X3? Well that you will find some very enticing prices on that given its more generalist capabilities...
