GoPro Fusion review – in pictures

If you thought the Hero5 had an ultra-wide field of view, GoPro’s latest action cam, the Fusion, promises 360-degree capture that misses absolutely nothing. Doesn’t this mean warped, fisheye videos that you have to scroll around on your phone? Nope. The Fusion shoots and auto-stitches 5.2k resolution video from its two-eyed cameras. Does it work? Let’s find out.

Design: bigger than before

In the shift from the standard 170-degree field of view to the all-encompassing 360 one, the GoPro Fusion has put on a few grams. At about 8cm square and a few centimetres thick, it’s bigger than the GoPro Hero5. But you’ll still be able to attach it to whatever you like and, let’s be honest, no-one looks cool wearing a bike helmet with an action cam strapped to it, no matter what the size.

Design: steady shooter

As part of the GoPro Fusion package you get a quick and easy low-rise tripod. This lets you move it away from your arms and head, making it easier to get solid footage. The stick also doubles as a tripod as it’s telescopic and the handle folds out to make little legs. You can take the Fusion just about anywhere too.

Overcapture: small world

Overcapture offers ways to process all the visual data from the 360-degree camera feed and compress it down into a standard flat format. The most dramatic is “little planet”, which makes it look like you’re shooting from a tiny planetoid, not flat earth. What you end up with is video that looks so wide-angle it appears to have broken the laws of physics. Fisheye is the other option, looking closer to what you’d see from a normal GoPro.

Usability: one button smarts

Using the GoPro Fusion is dead simple. There’s a power/mode button on the side and a shutter/capture button on the front. That’s it. Presses on the mode button flick between stills shooting, video and time lapse. You can alter a few parameters in a settings menu that follows these modes in the interface. But for the most part, you’ll just be pressing the capture button when you use the Fusion.

Usability: screen free

There’s no preview screen here, just a little LCD on one side that lets you see the mode used, how much battery you have left and how much space there is on the microSD cards. Yes, we said cards because there are two slots here, and you need to fill them both. Each camera records its own feed. It’s a reminder we’re actually dealing with two 180-degree feeds that are stitched together, not a single 360-degree-seeing eyeball.

Video quality: soft around the edges

Look carefully at your video and you’ll see the quality goes a bit wonky at the areas where the two feeds are stitched. The fix? Just try to point the Fusion vaguely at your subject rather than holding it 90 degrees on, which is where you’ll see the most image distortion. Treat the Fusion right and you can get some pretty incredible-looking footage out of it, with lots of detail, good dynamic range and punchy colour.

Software: needs work

Using the Fusion phone app you can apply cool transitions and zoom the field of view in and out with a pinch. And it does a good job of letting you control the framing options with gestures. But it only works with a limited number of phones at the moment – and the proper desktop software is pretty flaky if you try to handle full quality footage. Even with a powerful computer, you have to wait several minutes as the software processes your clips and, when it’s done, you can’t create pans or make the field of view alter mid-clip.

Verdict: the 360 camera you should be drooling over

The GoPro Fusion’s hardware is great. You can turn 360-degree video into a special effect shot that would have baffled Hollywood a decade ago, and both image quality and stabilisation are excellent. But the software is a bit undercooked – the mobile version’s support across handsets is desperately narrow and the desktop version is buggy and limited. Still, we have faith that it won’t be this way forever. The Fusion has enough promise to suggest it could yet blossom into the future of action cams, even if it’s currently a rough-around-the-edges trailblazer.