Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was rather excited to get this one as I liked Theta S, and was hoping that Theta V would be continuing the legacy of the previous model, but with better optics and processing hardware. So I ordered as soon as it was available on Amazon. Right away I was disappointed by stitching artifacts—double images at the borders between the images produced by either lens. These were absent in the images produced by previous, less expensive model—Theta S. Quite frankly, the fact that there were no stitching artifacts on Theta S was comforting. It was nice knowing that a usable image is possible out of camera right away. This is not the case with Theta V. Further analysis revealed that Theta V has a worse compression—simply looking at the images revealed that there si a visible macroblocking, especially visible at the edges of objects, making any improvement of the optics almost pointless.One of the reasons behind worse JPEG compression is smaller file size. Original from Theta S is 3.7MB while the Original from new Theta V is 1.1MB. Theta V has the same number of pixels, same JPEG encoding schema, but allocates only about 31% of the file size to the same image content. A pessimist in me thinks—is this what Ricoh doing to advertize improved transfer speeds per image? PROS: shaper optics, UHD for Video; possibly better color accuracy; better purple fringe control. CONS: stitching artifacts resulting in doubled image at any cross over edge between field of view of two lenses; significant quality loss due to smaller file size and therefore higher compression ratio (Images provided for reference are from Theta V (pinkish or orangeish hue) and from Theta S (cyan or greenish hue). For legend see side-by-side combined images)