The other day I was reading about how they filmed 1969’s Easy Rider. Taking advantage of the “ultra portable” film cameras of the day, they lay a cameraman down—holding the still, by our definition, very large camera—on the trunk lid of a luxury convertible, whose soft ride the filmmakers hoped wouldn’t jar the film.

They would’ve killed, I’m sure, for a gimbal camera like the Insta360 Luna Ultra. Here are the full details on Insta360’s latest vlogging camera that can shoot 8K video and, in 4K resolution or lower, slow motion.

a new, top-of-the-line vlogging camera

The Luna Ultra is an entirely new entry for Insta360 into handheld gimbal cameras. It’s not a leap into the unknown for the brand, though. For years they’ve been one of the major brands dominating the 360-degree action cam segment. Just look at the new Insta360 X6, which released last week, for a taste of how Insta360 knows how to combine intuitive controls, beautiful colors, and a Leica lens.

pros and cons

Benefits

• Detachable 2″ OLED screen can be used for remote monitoring
• 8K resolution and Dolby Vision means serious image quality
• 47GB of internal storage, plus a microSD card slot

Drawbacks

• Larger than competing handheld gimbal cameras
• 1,000 nits maximum brightness of control screen can be hard to read in very bright sunlight

how i tested

The weather was cooperative here in New York, so I took the Luna Ultra out for a pair of test drives, once at golden hour—that hour before sunset where the sun angles just right and casts everything in a particularly beautiful, warm, yellow hue—and once in the midday, which afflicts cameras with harsh light from a directly overhead sun. You can’t always choose when you can shoot, and so we wanted to see how the Luna Ultra did in both optimal conditions and not-so-great conditions.

what it’s like using the luna ultra

One of the Luna Ultra‘s neatest tricks is that its 2″ OLED touchscreen is detachable. I could pop it off and use it as a remote monitor when I wanted to set the camera up somewhere in a spot inconvenient for me to stand. Normally, I’d have had to just cross my fingers and hope everything stayed in frame. Popping the screen off, I could watch for a distance. It was even more helpful when working with an assistant who could keep an eye on the framing and color of the video as I devoted all of my attention to wielding the camera.

A Truly Easy Gimballed Rider

Not only is the Luna Ultra small and light enough for a person to wield with one hand, the 3-axis gimbal soaks up bumps and vibrations to provide the sort of smooth panning and steadiness while the operator holds it that you’d see in more professional video. Seriously, it was wild to see how steady the gimbal made the Luna Ultra, especially when I’d fire up a multi-million-dollar Hollywood movie from the early 1990s and see even their cameras were shakier.

And then there’s the AI tracking that the electrically powered gimbal allows. The Luna Ultra’s onboard software lets it lock in on a subject—my smiling mug, for example—and track it automatically. Holding the camera out at arm’s length, I didn’t have to worry about turning and twisting the camera to make sure that my face stayed in view as I walked and talked. It did so automatically. Nice touch.

Lights, (Action) Camera, Action

Speaking of color, its 1″ 8K sensor is sharp for a vlogging camera. It supports Dolby Vision, a premium video format standardized across many TV brands’ better TVs, by shooting at up to 30 frames per second (fps) in 8K resolution.

TV tends to shoot at 30fps, whereas film traditionally shoots at 24fps, but if you want a higher frame rate the Luna Ultra can step all the up to 120fps in 4K resolution. That means you can slow the picture way down for slow motion. It was a neat effect to see a car’s wheel spinning very slowly when shot at 120fps and then slowed down in post-production.

The Ultra version of the Luna adds a zoom lens that provides up to 6x telephoto zoom without a loss of quality. You can double that up to 12x, as long as you don’t mind progressively losing some video quality as you zoom in, as that’s a digital zoom function. Insta360 says the Luna Ultra will run for up to four hours on a charge. That’s about what I got, or was on track to get from it, since I never ran it fully down to zero.

is the luna ultra an action cam?

Not in the traditional sense, no. The Insta360 X6, for example, is an action camera. That means it’s designed to mount to motorcycle handlebars and snowboarders’ helmets, for example, places where the Luna Ultra with its integrated handle could not easily go. An action cam is also built to be particularly durable because you’re putting them in harms way. The X6 is IP68 rated for water resistance; it can survive being dunked 20 meters below the water’s surrface, whereas you need to keep the Luna Ultra dry. They’re for different uses. If you need to put the camera in a spot subject to abuse, go Insta360 X6. If you need a steady platform where you’ll be holding it all the time, pick the Luna Ultra.

can you turn off the gimbal?

Sort of. Functionally, yes, there’s a mode called FPV Mode that causes the camera to follow your movement and not smooth out the operator’s footsteps, stumbles, and unsteady arms. This type of filming is called shaky cam, and it’s used to convey a sense of frantic action. The operator runs whiles filming, and the video bounces around all hectic and dramatic. Think Saving Private Ryan or Children of Men.

the bottom line

Insta360 enters entirely new territory with the Luna Ultra. As the company’s first handheld, gimbal video camera made especially for vloggers, it joins Insta360’s entry into drones with Antigravity, as well as its long-standing position in the action cam space. Given the Luna Ultra’s specs sheet and my all-too-short time with it, I expect that in the world of vlogging gimbal cameras, Insta360 is here to stay.