DJI Osmo Pocket First Look

What is the DJI Osmo Pocket?

Looking to shoot slick, professional-looking videos for YouTube or your holiday highlights reel? You aren’t exactly short of pocketable options these days. Smartphones pack optical image stabilisation and powerful editing apps. Compact cameras have one-inch sensors and 40x optical zoom. Open your coat pocket and you can even slip in a 4K drone.

So why has DJI, best known as the leading manufacturer of the latter, made a tiny 4K video camera called the DJI Osmo Pocket? The answer is to bring the one feature that none of those other gadgets have into your jeans pocket – the mechanical gimbal.

If you’ve never used a mechanical gimbal, you’ll have certainly seen the effects they create – smooth pans and cinematic sweeps that not long ago required a steadicam and a core strength gym program. They’re commonplace on drones, and DJI made a handheld gimbal for smartphones called the DJI Osmo Mobile 2, but none have been truly trouser-friendly. Until now.

The DJI Osmo Pocket is by far the smallest mechanically-stabilised 4K video camera so far. While early photos brought to mind an electric toothbrush, even that does it a disservice – in the hand, it’s more like the size of a cigar, its 4K camera barely bigger than a dice.

It’s an amazing technological feat, but is it good enough to convince YouTube vloggers and amateur videographers to add it to their already crowded pockets? Here are our early thoughts.

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DJI Osmo Pocket – Design and controls

The Osmo Pocket’s design is a mix of wondrous miniaturisation and some slight usability compromises.

It certainly lives up to its name. This is as small a gimbal-stabilised 4K camera as current technology allows – the whole thing is barely bigger than a cigar, and weighs just 116g. It’s even smaller than it appears in photos.

In the hand, the Osmo Pocket’s plastic body feels solidly built and has a grippy finish, which is a pleasant change from soap-like smartphones. I felt comfortable slipping it inside my jacket pocket on its own, but it also comes with a rigid carry case to give its gimbal added protection.

The Osmo Pocket’s design is a tale of two halves. First, the good half – its three-axis gimbal is an amazing bit of engineering. DJI has been firing its shrink ray at drone gimbals for a while, but none of those have been this tiny. The three motors (pan, tilt and roll) work brilliantly to counteract your hand’s movements, and also spin the camera round instantaneously to the front, which is a real boon for vlogging.

Naturally, the Osmo Pocket has had to make a few compromises to become truly pocketable, and you’ll find these below the camera. There’s a one-inch touchscreen for controlling modes and video playback. This is just about big enough to be useable, but going from a 5.7-inch smartphone to a postage stamp felt a bit like going back to the early days of Archos Jukeboxes.

Recognising this screen’s limitations, DJI has included a crucial expansion slot for attaching both your smartphone and several accessories that help compensate for its lack of physical controls. In the box, you get USB-C and Lightning connectors that slide into this slot, so your Android or iOS phone can plug into its side and serve up controls and playback from the DJI Memo app. Alternatively, you can slot in the Controller Wheel accessory, which you can see below.

I don’t think DJI has quite nailed the Osmo Pocket’s out-of-box usability. Neither the one-inch screen or your smartphone display feel like completely natural ways to control it. The built-in screen, while surprisingly responsive for changing modes, understandably lacks a virtual joystick to let you pan or tilt the camera. And with most phones now being phablet-sized, most tend to completely dwarf the Osmo Pocket and make it feel a bit unbalanced in your hand. Because of the connector’s position, your phone is also never flush with either the Osmo Pocket or flat surfaces that you might want to place it on for extra stability. It just feels like it needs a little more refinement.

This is far from a deal-breaker, and the flip side of the Osmo Pocket’s size (both with and without your smartphone attached) is that it’s incredibly light for long shooting sessions. But it would have been great if DJI’s Controller Wheel accessory (a £53 extra) came in in the box, as it’s the ideal middle ground between using the screen and your phone. DJI now bundles a physical controller with its Spark – maybe one day the Controller Wheel will come with the Osmo Pocket.

Without it, your only physical controls are the two buttons below the screen – one for recording, and the other for both power and basic functions. The latter button has three jobs. One press switches between video and photo mode. Two presses re-centres the gimbal, which is a handy ‘reset’ button if you’ve done a lot of panning. And three presses flips the camera around for vlogging and selfie duty. It works well and soon becomes second nature after a little practice.

If you’re looking at the Osmo Pocket as an alternative to an action camera, it’s worth bearing in mind that it isn’t waterproof without a case (which you can buy separately). That’s because its two other ports (a microSD slot slot on the side, and USB-C port underneath) are both exposed rather than hidden behind rubber flaps. There also isn’t a tripod mount on the underside of the Osmo Pocket, though you’ll be able to add one with an accessory.

The benefit of that USB-C port, though, is that you can quickly top up its battery using a portable charging pack, a handy bonus for all-day recording given that its 845mAh battery tops out at two hours of 4K recording at 30fps.

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DJI Osmo Pocket – Features and app

So what exactly can this tiny, pocket camera do? In terms of raw shooting power, it’s best to think of the DJI Osmo Pocket as a super-stabilised alternative to a compact camera or action cam, rather a DSLR or mirrorless camera.

That’s because it has a 1/2.3-inch sensor (similar in size to most compact cameras and smartphones), which can shoot 4K video at 60fps or 12-megapixel stills. While this sensor size means it lacks the dynamic range and low light capabilities of a compact system camera, its mechanical stabilisation certainly helps in gloomy conditions. A small sensor size also means more manageable file sizes and pocketable dimensions.

For added help when the light fades, the Osmo Pocket’s lens has a relatively bright f/2.0 aperture, and image quality is further by a 100Mbps data rate (which trumps the GoPro Hero 7 Black’s).

Of course, video quality isn’t just about spec sheets, but the Osmo Pocket is well-equipped to deal with most lighting situations. If you’re planning to shoot in really bright conditions (skiing, for example) you can also buy Neutral Density (ND) filters to help ‘stop down’ the lens to prevent high shutter speeds and choppy-looking video.

To focus too much on pure video quality is also slightly missing the point of the DJI Osmo Pocket. This is a fun, versatile camera for amateur filmmakers rather than pros and, just like DJI’s drones, it’s packed with special modes that take it beyond your smartphone camera.

Two of these modes are particularly useful. Firstly, ‘ActiveTrack’ is a huge bonus for vloggers and generally filming. Like in DJI’s drones, you just drag a box around the person or object you want to keep in shot – be that your face when talking to camera, or a point of interest in your travel video – and it’ll keep it in shot. This is more than just autofocus – thanks to the gimbal, you can point the camera in a different direction and it’ll turn to keep a lock on your subject, panning smoothly in the process. It’s brilliant and is something your fixed lens smartphone just can’t do, even with software trickery.

The same is true of ‘MotionLapse’, which combines a traditional timelapse with automatic panning from the gimbal. You can also decide the path it takes, choosing up to four points for it to film between. The only downside for this mode is that the Osmo Pocket doesn’t have a tripod thread, so unless you buy yet another accessory, you’ll have to hold it still for the duration, which can be anything from five minutes to five hours. Make sure you take those gloves.

Beyond those modes, you also get more traditional slo-mo (at 120fps), time-lapse, story mode (an auto editing feature in the same vein as GoPro’s Quik app) and panoramas. Although you’re unlikely to be buying a DJI Osmo Pocket for its still shooting, given the capabilities of your smartphone. This is very much a video camera with a side of stills.

With that in mind, DJI gives you a lot fine-tuning over both the gimbal’s behaviour and its video. For the former, you can choose between ‘tilt locked’ (handy for shooting horizontal pans), FPV (for making it behave more like an action cam) or ‘follow’ (which means it smoothly pans in the direction you move it).

And while the Osmo Pocket isn’t aimed at pros, there is some pretty granular control over video settings, if you want to dig deeper. Beyond resolution and frame-rates, you can go fully manual with ISO, shutter speed, white balance and exposure compensation. DJI even said that there are plans to bring D-log recording, which lets you grade the colours afterwards, at some point in the future with a firmware update.

The only slight shame is that, again unless you buy another accessory, your audio recording options don’t anywhere near match this level of video control. Out of the box, the DJI Osmo Pocket has stereo microphones (one on the front aimed at vloggers) and one underneath. I haven’t yet given these a proper test, but if you want your videos to include a lot of spoken audio you’re likely to want to buy the accessory with a 3.5mm jack for an external directional microphone.

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DJI Osmo Pocket early verdict

To begin with, using a little pocket video camera felt like a throwback to the Flip Video (or, more recently, the ill-fated HTC Re). But it soon became clear why DJI has made the Osmo Pocket – unlike those two gadgets, this charming, gimbal-stabilised camera does things that smartphones, compacts and action cameras simply can’t do.

The question is, will its cinematic video effects convince vloggers and amateur videographers to fork out an extra £329 on top of their ‘good enough’ smartphones, GoPros or Sony A6000s? I’d say so, but that price tag and the number of accessories the DJI Osmo Pocket needs to unlock its potential mean that number won’t initially be as high as the many who flocked towards the £109 Osmo Mobile 2.

There’s no doubt that for YouTube vloggers who mostly film on the move rather than in a home studio, the Osmo Pocket is shaping up to be a fantastic camera that fills a gap between compacts and smartphones, and bigger compact system cameras.

It’s just a shame that a couple more of the accessories, particularly the Controller Wheel, aren’t included in the box. There is an Expansion Kit on the way, but that’ll be an extra £99 that takes your investment well over £400.

Right now, the DJI Osmo Pocket feels like a fantastic little video camera that is usable rather than a joy to use. Some of that is simply down to size limitations, but if DJI can iron out some of its minor frustrations (a slightly buggy app, out-of-box controls) then it could, quite literally, have another winner on its hands. We’ll bring you our full verdict very soon.

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