Pint-Sized Marvel

DJI Osmo Pocket.

byMarcus Wong

DJI Osmo Pocket.

Hand-held stabilizers for your mobile phone are nothing new these days; with the likes of Feiyu, Zhiyun all getting into the market with their oﬀerings. However, these stabilizers often require a separate carrying solution as they are fairly large themselves; not to mention their need for spare batteries!

Not so with DJI’s latest innovation though. The aptly named Osmo Pocket (henceforth “Pocket) is a miniaturized Osmo that will literally fit in your pocket. It measures just 121.9 x 28.6 x 36.9mm and weighs just 116g, while coming with its own touchscreen that brings up diﬀerent menus just by swiping up, down, left or right. There’s a slot for a microSD card (up to 128GB with write speed over 15MB/s) and two main buttons to start recording and accept settings so you can really record videos without the use of a mobile phone.

Despite boasting active mechanical stabilization, the Pocket oﬀers approximately two full hours of recording at 4K (3840x2160) 30p. 4K 60p recording is also possible on the 1/ 2.3” sensor, while 12MP stills are captured in both JPEG or DNG formats. It’s worth noting that the Osmo Pocket will charge via powerbank too, and there’s also a charging case accessory planned that also lets you put in two microSD cards, four ND filters and two smartphone connectors – in short, all you need for a shoot in a handy package.

The Controller Wheel in particular will be most handy if you intend to use the Pocket without your smartphone, as it allows you to move the gimbal both vertically and horizontally. The Extension Rod is also something we’d look at picking up, as without it there’s no option to mount the Pocket on a tripod, which you’ll want to do to take advantage of the timelapse features built-in.

We’d recommend using the Pocket with your mobile phone as this allows you a much larger screen to view on and the option to control the gimbal in all four directions smoothly. If you use just the Pocket, you can only control vertical movement via the rear screen, so having this flexibility helps. Using your mobile phone also hands control over to the new DJI Mimo app.

This was specically built for the Pocket, and adds a new Story mode feature which basically contains a set of templates for timed camera movements with transitions, color eﬀects, and accompanying music built in. There’s supposed to be an option to create your own template, but that wasn’t available at time of testing so we can’t comment on that.

Using the Mimo app, you can also draw a rectangle over your subject to have the camera track it. Handy when you’re trying to catch video of sport. However, the subject does need to be fairly large in the frame, so this won’t work as well if the subject is in the distance. We’d love for it to be able to track a basketball instead of a player for example, so the camera automatically follows the action.

The Pocket is capable of capturing images with good detail in good light. Images captured at lower light are quite acceptable too, given the camera is only using a 1/ 2.3” sensor. The audio capture from the internal microphones is also very usable, as a good amount of detail was been picked up in all the videos we recorded.

We really like how small the Pocket is. It’s a fuss free solution that you can really easily bring around to whip out at a moment’s notice. Being able to either work standalone or with the added features of the Mimo app gives you the flexibility to change the way you work based on the situation. And of course, DJI’s gimbal technology lets you “float” the camera with ease, letting you do more without needing a tripod.

The next thing of course, is price. At $519, the Osmo Pocket costs almost twice as much as the Osmo Mobile 2 and slots roughly between GoPro’s Hero 7 Black and the Hero 7 Silver, which retail for $595 and $440 respectively. However, the Osmo Mobile 2 doesn’t come with a camera and the GoPros only have electronic stabilization (or a gimbal), so you could argue that the comparison doesn’t hold well there.

However, that’s the point. Tere really is nothing else that’s this compact on the market right now, and for what it does, we’d say $519 is well worth the price.