Insta360 has already claimed a place at the top of the gimbal camera market with the premium Luna Ultra which includes a telephoto lens. This week the company also extended the camera's range in two ways – one is a firmware update that every customer can have for free, another is an optional piece of hardware as quirky and powerful as the original camera itself.
The update increases the maximum zoom of the Luna Ultra from 12x to 15x, although, of course, it doesn't change the optical hardware.
The other new piece of hardware, which I've been lucky enough to get my hands on early, is the 1.5x magnifying Ultra Telephoto Adapter (as I write, it is listed as temporarily out of stock on the Insta360 Store).
It clips over the Ultra's dual camera system and – slightly curiously, I admit – blocks the wide-angle lens completely.
Because this means that as you zoom out wide, the shot just goes black, this left me a little irked at first, but I imagine that I'd have been more annoyed by the alternative – a wide view always partly obscured by the rim of the telephoto lens!
The lens is priced at $49.99 / £46.99, and as I said, can already be found on the Insta360 site.
The firmware will include improvements to the telephoto stability and low-light modes, with an emphasis on concert capability.
There is one more significant software update for customers, potentially envious of the 1-lens Luna Pro's 4K vertical shooting feature.
Up until now DJI and even the Luna Ultra have offered a lower resolution (2.7K or 3K) for when the cameras were used to shoot vertically despite having monitoring screens that could rotate to a vertical position. Why? Because the imaging camera did not rotate.
The Luna Pro, however, managed to push that to 4K and, since it used the same sensor as the Luna Ultra's 1-inch wide sensor, this update was expected but still welcome.
All these changes have kept things very interesting in the best pocket gimbal camera guide.
