This underwater action cam captured my Hawaii trip in ways I didn’t think possible

I recently spent a week in Hawaii for my daughter’s wedding, and captured some fantastic underwater video with the Insta360 X5. I went snorkeling with manta rays, explored the shoreline full of tropical fish, and swam alongside sea turtles with the action cam, then shared these amazing experiences with family and friends back home viewing my content from the safety of their couch. 

ZDNET’s Ant Pruitt reviewed the Insta360 X5 a couple of months ago, and he praised its performance, so I had to try one out for myself. Although it had been several years since I used an Insta360 X series camera, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to test it out in the clear waters of Hawaii and couldn’t have timed it better with the release of an update that provided new underwater capture features.

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What’s new now is Insta360’s diving update, bringing AquaVision 3.0 support to the Insta360 smartphone app and desktop Studio program. In addition, a diving stats dashboard is now available for Suunto watches, including the Suunto Race 2 that I recently reviewed.

The Insta360 X5 connects to either your smartphone with the Insta360 app or your computer via Wi-Fi or a direct or USB-C connection. You can also subscribe to Insta360 Plus and have all of your content synced to the cloud and then accessible from the Insta360 app on all of your devices. 

With the captured content now available in the Insta360 app, swing over to the right side to access the Media Processing options and you should see the AquaVision 3.0 toggle in the Color Restoration section of the app.

With the invisible dive case and a floating hand grip, the camera stayed dry while snorkeling around the big island of Hawaii, but it did get warm while I was swimming in the sun. Regardless, I was able to capture awesome footage of manta rays, sea turtles, and a large variety of fish whose Hawaiian names I cannot pronounce.   

Family and friends were blown away by the footage I showed them on my Z Fold 7. The AquaVision 3.0 menu option offers four color profiles that work with the AquaVision feature, and the Insta360 AI algorithm does the rest. The waters of Hawaii are already clear, but the AquaVision profiles definitely enhanced the footage while also letting you choose the image’s temperature and saturation levels.

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I highly recommend the evening snorkeling adventure with manta rays off the coast of Kona. We had 15 large rays swimming and feeding on plankton below our light boards, and thanks to the Insta360 X5 I was able to share this experience with people who were unable to make the trip out with us. 

We even had a Galapagos shark show up, and without the footage captured by the X5 I don’t think people would have believed the eight-foot predator was swimming just below us.

Insta360 also supports syncing metrics from a large variety of data sources, including Garmin, Strava, Coros, and more. My Suunto Race 2 smartwatch has a snorkeling mode and diving mode, and recently added support for the Insta360, giving me the perfect opportunity to test it out. 

One morning, I took the Insta360 X5 out with me, launched snorkeling mode on my Suunto Race 2 smartwatch, and was able to record two separate sessions — but it wasn’t until I returned home that I saw it never acquired the GPS signal. The video was fine, but it just didn’t capture all the health metrics to sync with the video. I encourage you to test out the smartwatch pairing in advance if you want those metrics to appear on your video clips.

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When you do have a reliable GPS signal, metrics for depth, duration, heart rate, and water temperature are available to overlay on your video. I even dove down to the bottom a few times and the Race 2 captured these dives, but for some reason I was unable to get the stats to show up on the video and think it may have something to do with the time zone change that may not have matched between the camera and the smartwatch. I guess I’ll have to take another trip to Hawaii to test out this functionality.

In addition to the amazing underwater video and photos I shot with the Insta360 X5, I captured guest speeches at the rehearsal dinner, the sunset meet and greet cruise on a catamaran, and greetings from guests so I now have memories that will be enjoyed for decades thanks to Insta360. The video output is outstanding and the camera even picked up audio with background music playing.