DJI Osmo Pocket - Hands-On Review

Earlier today DJI introduced the new Osmo Pocket Gimbal – a tiny stabilized hand-held camera with a true 3-axis gimbal, a monitor and a host of features and accessories. Dave Altizer from Kinotika had a chance to play with this little unit and came back impressed.

A couple of years ago DJI came our with the original Osmo stabilized camera gimbal – reviews were kind of mixed and now the company is trying to improve things with an updated model which is smaller (4.8 x 1.5 x 1.1″ / 121.9 x 36.9 x 28.6 mm), lighter (4.09 oz / 116 g) and more capable.

The pocket has a 1/2.3-inch sensor (yeah just like your smartphone… we were really hoping for a 1″ sensor on this one – may be in a pro version), 80° field of view and an f/2.0 aperture. It can shoot up 4K/60fps video at 100 Mbps as well as stills including RAW images (12MP) and panoramas.

The unit has a tiny touch screen as well an accessory (called universal) port which allows you to connect all different types of accessories (some will be available with the unit in mid-December 2018 and some later on).

This unit can shoot timelapse, 3×3 panoramas, motionlapse and has a nightshot mode as well as do active tracking on subjects (which seems to work pretty well actually), face tracking and more. You can connect it (physically) to your smartphone or wirelessly using an add-on unit sold separately. It records on a micro SD card or directly to your smartphone if it is connected.

The unit has a record time of 140 min but it can charge on the fly from USB (the unit itself has a USB-C port on the bottom.

At the end of the day, it might all depend on pricing and the DJI Osmo Pocket comes in at a very affordable $350 which just might turn it into a holiday hit next month when it becomes available.

Dave Altizer also made a compersion of the new DJI Osmo Pocket vs. GoPro HERO 7 Black

Iphonedo also made a hands-on review (just skip the rather annoying intro part)

You can find many more photography gear announcements and new products on our photography gear section here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.