No class of camera escapes the resolution wars – now things have truly hotted up in the world of action cameras, as Chinese manufacturer Nello announces the X3K+, the first action camera to be capable of shooting 8K video.
It sports a Sony CMOS sensor, with an effective resolution of 64MP for stills, and uses the Ambaralla H22 chipset for processing.
Users have a number of video resolution options – you can shoot 4K at up to 60p, 6K at up to 30p, or the headline figure of 8K at up to 15p. If you drop down to Full HD, there’s also a 120fps option for super-slow motion footage.
As is pretty much required on serious action cameras these days, the Nello X3K+ has dual screens – a 2-inch touchscreen on the rear, and a 1.3-inch screen on the front for selfie shooting. It comes equipped with a ‘HyperSmooth’ stabilization system, which the makers say is a six-axis system designed to significantly combat camera-shake. The camera is also waterproof down to 10m, and fields a wide-angle lens with a 150° field of view.
So far, so action camera. Where the X3K+ sets itself apart is the price – with a recommended retail price of €104 ($121, or about £88), which is considerably more affordable than both the GoPro Hero 9 Black and the DJI Osmo Action, and qualify it as one of the best budget action cameras around.
Indeed, Nello is plainly attempting to nip at the heels of both these firms – the manufacturers released a comparison image purporting to show night shots from the X3K+ and DJI Osmo Action side by side, and the X3K+ does appear to produce much better detail and contrast.
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Of course, we’ll have to wait until we can get a sample of the camera in for testing before we can verify it’s as good as the manufacturers claim.
Nello is also promising an Android app for the X3K+, though from a glance at the Google Play store, it doesn’t look like this has rolled out yet.
There isn't a confirmed availability date for the X3K+ yet, but it looks like it'll be soon. The GoPro Hero 10 Black was a fairly incremental upgrade, with a resolution topping out at 5.3K, so it'll be interesting to see whether this upstart competitor prompts the action camera market leader to up its pixel counts for the next iteration. And maybe soon we'll get a glimpse at – whisper it – the DJI Osmo Action 2, and see how it compares.
Jon spent years at IPC Media writing features, news, reviews and other photography content for publications such as Amateur Photographer and What Digital Camera in both print and digital form. With his additional experience for outlets like Photomonitor, this makes Jon one of our go-to specialists when it comes to all aspects of photography, from cameras and action cameras to lenses and memory cards, flash diffusers and triggers, batteries and memory cards, selfie sticks and gimbals, and much more besides.
An NCTJ-qualified journalist, he has also contributed to Shortlist, The Skinny, ThreeWeeks Edinburgh, The Guardian, Trusted Reviews, CreativeBLOQ, and probably quite a few others I’ve forgotten.
