What Will Decide the Next Phase of Gimbal Camera Competition?

Preface

 TrueView

Hardware makers' growth stories inevitably come down to a choice between a single blockbuster product and multi-line expansion. Armed with the dividend of form-factor innovation, Insta360 is trying to use product iteration and an all-category lineup to shore up near-term sales growth while delivering on its long-term technology narrative.

But as resources concentrate on debut selling points and growth pressure filters down to the end market, beneath the dazzling sales figures the twin hazards of friction in the user experience and squeezed profits have already emerged.

This article will focus on

1 Why does form-factor innovation inevitably fall short of its dazzling concept when it reaches the market?

2Is the accessory ecosystem gap a sign of lagging development or flawed product definition?

3What irreversible brand damage can result from distorted sales strategies?

4In the second half of the gimbal camera market, how can manufacturers build lasting competitive moats?

Content/Huanlao

Editor/Yong'e

Proofreading/Mangfu

In the cutthroat consumer electronics arena, gimbal cameras are one of the few bright spots for growth, completing the leap from a niche creator tool to mainstream consumer electronics in just three years.

Yet as the market continues to expand, the underlying logic of industry competition is quietly shifting. Early on, spec upgrades and form-factor innovation were enough to trigger explosive sales, but as the novelty wears off for users, the weight placed on real-world repeat-use experience is rising fast.

Recent industry research by Jiuqian Consulting, drawing on focus group interviews and insights extracted from millions of cross-platform social media posts, has revealed a harsh industry consensus: the second half of the gimbal camera competition has arrived, and consumer demand is diverging sharply.

Against a backdrop of increasingly homogeneous hardware specs, across-the-board supply chain cost increases, and the ever-present possibility that smartphone giants could enter the fray at any time, the industry's margin for error is shrinking rapidly.

As the industry shifts into this new phase of competition, Insta360, a core player in the category, has become a first-rate case study for the industry through its product logic and business moves.

With a keen nose for the market and aggressive form-factor innovation, Insta360 has carved out a sizable slice of the market pie. But strip away the launch hype and the filter of KOL marketing, and post-purchase feedback acts like a mirror, exposing the many hidden risks left in the wake of its rapid growth and reflecting the common problems behind the gimbal camera industry's high-speed expansion.

Part.1

The Detachable-Screen Fairy Tale Meets Reality

The Upside of Innovation and the Downside of Experience

As hardware spec improvements hit a plateau, form-factor innovation has become the shared path for gimbal camera makers to break out of homogeneity. Detachable-screen interaction, multi-focal-length combinations and new structural designs are all differentiation directions the industry is exploring.

Insta360's detachable-screen design is one of the most representative attempts. The Luna Ultra features a 2-inch OLED touchscreen that can be magnetically detached from the body, with video transmission supported up to 20 meters.

From a product-definition standpoint, this design is both a bold gamble and a clever move, precisely addressing the framing and blind-shooting pain points of solo creators while seeking to reinvent the interaction paradigm of gimbal cameras. The exploration itself holds reference value for the entire category.

But this is how the consumer electronics industry has always worked: first-generation products with entirely new form factors often have concepts that run ahead of a mature user experience, and Insta360 has not escaped this industry-wide pattern.

Jiuqian's research shows that while the detachable screen brings novelty, it also introduces noticeable compromises in the experience. The most direct pain point is the reliability of video transmission, with the detachable screen disconnecting or showing high latency during actual shooting.

A less visible friction than disconnections is the mental burden created by battery life and charging logic. The detachable screen is designed to mean one fewer device to carry, integrating smartphone monitoring into a removable display.

In practice, however, the standalone screen drains power faster than users expect, and the charging logic is also flawed. Users must plan battery levels in advance and carry an extra charging accessory before heading out, defeating the product's original promise of effortless recording.

At the same time, the high expectations created by the form-factor innovation further widen the gap between sample footage and real-world results.

Professional content creators on social media showcase the product's maximum image quality through composition, camera movement and post-production color grading; ordinary users often pay for that ceiling, but lack the professional skills to reproduce footage of the same quality.

This gap between expectation and reality is prompting many users who bought on impulse for the novelty to end up leaving the device idle in a drawer.

This is the test the entire industry must face. Form-factor innovation cannot remain at the concept stage of launch events. Whether leading product ideas can be turned into stable, reliable, hassle-free everyday experiences determines whether innovation becomes a long-term barrier or just a short-term marketing gimmick.

Part.2

Reuse Details as the Dividing Line in Experience

The Overlooked Ecosystem and Arrogant Feature Definition

Competition in imaging devices goes beyond the hardware itself; the accessory ecosystem, feature completeness and basic experience together determine the product's scope of use and user stickiness.

Yet during the industry's rapid expansion, manufacturers have generally tilted R&D and resources toward headline launch features, while investment in underlying user experience and ecosystem building has lagged. This is a common weakness across the gimbal camera segment.

This is particularly evident in Insta360's user feedback. First, the pace of accessory ecosystem development has failed to keep up with product iteration. Audio devices, mounting brackets, protective cases and storage solutions are both the core vehicles for extending product use cases and an important high-margin revenue source for the imaging category.

But Insta360's official accessory ecosystem is still being built out, with room to improve in both variety and compatibility. Advanced creators are forced to turn to third-party accessories, which not only compromises consistency of the experience but also causes the company to miss out on incremental ecosystem revenue.

From a business perspective, accessories are typically a high-margin cash cow for hardware companies. A disconnected ecosystem means voluntarily giving up an important profit pool, while also weakening users' long-term loyalty when it comes to upgrading devices.

What puzzles some hardcore users even more is the absence of certain must-have features. In an era when everything can be livestreamed, the device does not support a basic USB webcam mode; it lacks a full-lock function for handling certain complex camera moves; and the limited minimum focusing distance rules out macro shooting.

These features may pose no insurmountable technical challenge. Their absence more likely reflects a trade-off made by the manufacturer at the product definition stage.

In the chase for headline-grabbing specs such as extreme frame rates and large-format CMOS sensors, some underlying needs that genuinely affect frequent, repeated use have been strategically deprioritized.

In addition, body heat during long-form, high-spec video recording hangs over the entire industry like the sword of Damocles.

When a device marketed as portable and ready to record anytime is forced to stop shooting or drop frame rates because of overheating, it completely defeats users' core desire for hassle-free capture.

In an era of traffic where specs are everything, manufacturers can easily fall into the illusion that as long as their strengths are strong enough, users will tolerate their weaknesses. But the cruelty of business is that what determines whether a device is carried out of the door frequently is often not its strongest selling point, but its most irritating pain point.

When fiddling outweighs the fun, consumer enthusiasm quickly cools.

Part.3

Strategic Distortions and Profit Risks

Business Anxiety Behind the Subsidy Dispute

The gimbal camera market is already seeing a price war kick off before full-scale competition has even unfolded. Average selling prices across the industry continue to decline, and with smartphone makers expected to enter the fray, the pressure of competing for a mature market is being released early.

Manufacturers across the industry face a common dilemma between maintaining growth and protecting margins, and some companies are already showing strategic distortions on the sales side.

As a core player in the category, Insta360 has sustained rapid revenue growth in recent years, but pressure on profitability has been equally evident.

In 2025, Insta360 posted full-year revenue of 9.741 billion yuan, up 74.76% year on year, while net profit attributable to shareholders slipped slightly to 929 million yuan. In the first quarter of 2026, revenue surged 83.11% year on year to 2.481 billion yuan, but net profit attributable to shareholders plunged 52.02% year on year.

The official explanation is "high-intensity strategic investment." R&D spending reached 1.53 billion yuan in 2025, up 96.95% year on year and exceeding the total of the previous three years combined; R&D investment in the first quarter of 2026 was 465 million yuan, up 100.59% year on year.

Trading investment for growth is a standard path in the technology industry, but against a backdrop of falling prices across the sector, the dual pressure of growth and profit can easily filter down to the sales front end and distort strategy.

The bundled sales of value-added services and the public controversy over government subsidies mentioned in the research are essentially stopgap measures to balance retail pricing and profit levels amid intensifying price competition.

Take the subsidy controversy: the gap between the listed retail price and the post-subsidy price gives consumers the impression that they are trading their subsidy eligibility for a regular selling price. This has not only sparked compliance concerns but also directly eroded user trust in the brand.

Such short-term tactics may lift current-period sales and sustain gross margins for a while, but over the long term, the depletion of brand trust is a hidden cost that is far harder to repair.

More worrying is that when the product itself has friction in the user experience, controversies on the sales side create a compounding effect that amplifies users' negative perceptions. If consumers feel they are being played during the purchase process and then encounter dropped connections, overheating, or missing features in later use, their frustration will be magnified many times over, ultimately damaging brand reputation and users' willingness to repurchase.

This is precisely one of the hidden risks in Insta360's current performance.

The business model for hardware products should not be a one-off sale. Sustained growth depends on repeat purchases and organic word-of-mouth referrals.

Moreover, in a mature market where traffic dividends have peaked and consumers are holding their wallets tighter, high customer acquisition costs that fail to deliver long-term user lifetime value make a company's profit model extremely fragile.

The first half of the gimbal camera industry was driven by category innovation and hardware upgrades that educated the market and expanded scale; in the second half, competition will ultimately return to user experience and long-term value.

The problems Insta360 now faces are not unique to one company, but the inevitable growing pains of an entire industry shifting from rapid growth to high-quality development.

From the implementation of form-factor innovation, to the building and refinement of the ecosystem, to the long-term cultivation of brand trust, every link is critical in determining how far a company can go.

For every player, the core support for riding out the cycle lies in shifting attention from the spotlight of launch events to the small, everyday scenarios users actually face, and devoting part of the energy spent on the spec race to polishing reusable details.

END

       Original title: The inflection point has arrived — what will decide the second half for gimbal cameras?