Kogeto Dot 360° video lens If you’ve ever dabbled in the world of panoramic photography and tried to stitch images together so that they form a virtual reality movie, you’ll know, frankly, what a pain in the backside it can be. There’s the lining up of the shots, the careful positioning of camera and tripod, and, of course, there’s always some stray …
Thinking the same. Decent lenses aren't cheap but you can get canikon "niffty 50's" for the same sort of money (maybe another £20) that are an order of magnitude more complex, and with apparently 2 orders of magnitude better image quality judging from the frankly shocking video.
I know injection molding tooling isn't cheap and this isn't going to be flying off shelves any time soon, but it's priced far too dear for a gimmicky toy, and performs far too poorly for any sort of serious video blogging nonsense.
It's not just the cost injection molding (and other manufacturing costs) - they also provide a free app and web service for sharing the content, so they have to amortize software costs as well. To say nothing of R&D necessary to build the entire system in the first place.
I love it when people wonder out loud why a product costs more than its component parts, as if those parts magically assembled themselves into the complex configuration by their own volition.
I thought my comments about tooling costs could be read more broadly to mean "I know they have to recover sunk costs but..." rather than "They only need to recover tooling costs and....." The rest of the post still stands, it's massively over priced considering material cost and optical performance and is priced far too dearly for mass appeal. They would have been far more likely to make their fortune selling a million of these things at £10 each, rather than selling 1000 at £70 a piece.
Personally I think R&D costs were a few hours in autocad, and enough business bullshit to hoodwink a venture capitalist, the thing is objectively an optical and ergonomics disaster. Software development and web-hosting costs as much as your willing to spend, which can be a lot when it's someone else's money and the project lead is your best mate.
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