Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “DJI Osmo Pocket 3: my favorite gadget of the year”.
The idea of owning an Osan pocket a tiny camera on a gimbal, always intrigued me, but it was always sort of on a nice to have list and it was kind of hard to justifi spending money on it. Between my drones and GoPros and personal cameras and work cameras, the pocket line felt unnecessary and I was never really impressed with the image quality of the pocket one or too, but with a larger 1ed sensor. I thought I would give the pocket 3 a go. I took it with me on all my recent trips. I brought it skiing on every day walks. I brought it to the beach, build my friends and yep that is Becca with an Emmy. So if you have not congratulated her yet, please do so, and I even filmed the former president with it and, to my surprise, the osop pocket 3 became my favorite Gadget of the Year this. This tiny little camera kept surprising me with some of the clips. I was able to get the videos look rich in detail without being oversharpened d m gives you enough dynamic range while also being flexible to edit and post, and it is a tiny little camera on a gimbal.
You can get shots that you normally wouldn’t get with a different camera, quick disclaimer. I did not have ND filters for it, so don’t judge too hard. If you see some of these clips do look a little stuttery ERS are on our way and the best part of it is they all attach atically to the camera. Just like this wide- angle, adapter, that’s also the reason why most of the clips you’ll see here are at 60 frames per second.
So before I get too deep into pixel peeping, we have to take a second to talk about who this product is, for I’m reviewing this as a photographer videographer content, creator type, I’m prioritizing performance or image, quality, versatility and reliability. The other use cases for it are one as a travel camera and two as a vlogging camera, in that case, you’re, probably prioritizing Simplicity and the pocket 3 na Nails. All of those use cases. Okay back to image quality.
The low light performance is also really solid, but it’s nothing to scream about there’s a dedicated low light mode which is held by the larger F2 aperture. That F2 aperture also allows for some nice background separation, and this camera does have some AI featur, so wouldn’t be surprised if DJI is sort of exaggerating that one a little bit take as a compliment. So the AI feature that I mentioned: it’s called glamour mode and it can basically just beautify your skin. So let’s go through a list of things you can do with it. You can smooth out your skin. You can slim down your cheeks your whole face, which makes it uh kind of pointy. You can change the size of your eyes as well change your nose appearance. It can be a little bit Slimmer if you want that too, and some more weird ones like lipstick and eyebrows and blush, and things like that, you get the put and also here’s what happens. If you turn on all of those things to 100 %, you you’re welcome. Okay, I can’t believe I’m only getting to this now, but the screen is fantastic for one, it is OLED and it looks great. I mean it is a tiny 2in screen, but it is large enough, so you can frame your shots better and change your settings on the Fly, yet it’s small enough not to be cumbersome for the most part. I kept my settings on auto, but for some of the shots where I wanted to dial in settings getting to the menu is just a few more swipes away that I would have liked, but, more importantly, flipping the screen to turn the device on or off or Changing filming orientation is such a clever way of interacting with this device that it just made it fun to use.
So considering this as a gimbal, My Hope was that the camera itself would just flip on its side for True vertical filming sort of like what DJI drones do, specifically the mavic 3 Pro and the mavic 4 mini. Instead, the pocket crops the sides. Nevertheless, you still get a decently wide field of view and footage looks good, but not all modes work in vertical, so there’s no dedicated night mode, which that’s okay but there’s also no 120 frames per second, and it is limited to 3K resolution kind of bummed out About those two, let’s talk photos, so I really didn’t use the pocket 3 for still photos as much. They look fine, nothing wrong with them, and it’s nice that you can capture them, but I’d still rather reach for my more versatile phone with multiple lenses or my dedicated camera with a pocket 3, you can shoot Square photos, 16×9 photos or panorama photos and that’s about It the default photos, look nice, but the panoramic ones they kind of tweak the color a little bit they’re, just not consistent throughout, as you can see right here. Okay, here’s a long list of other things. I’Ve noticed using this device, so the build quality and the accessory system is great here. The bundle costs 120 bucks more, but it is worth it.
You get a tripod mount tripod legs external battery, which is great, and this handy DJI, mic 2 microphone and a carrying case. The cover for the gimbal is wellb built and has a dedicated spot for storing your wide angle or mis filters, which is also magnetic. I love that touch the battery life could be better. It won’t last you for a full day.
I kept charging it a lot, but what I will say is that it performed way better in cold weather than I expected it to, unlike some other cameras, GoPro, and it also charges surprisingly quickly little over half an hour and you’re good from zero to full. So if you use gimbals, you know that sometimes they do capture a swaying motion, especially going up and down, and you cannotice that in the corners of the image, but I found that using dji’s active track really helps to keep things extra, stable and minimize that sway. It’S still there, but it gets better.
An active track itself is really great, not perfect, but my success rate with it locking onto people or things or buildings has been very solid. Distortion on the main lens is handled very nicely, but not so much with the wide angle. Adapter, the DJI mimo app is really good and you can apply rck 709, L right then, and there.
The only thing I wish DJI had is cloud stor solution like GoPro. Does I think it would be beneficial both here and especially for drum Pilots? It’S fun to use a webcam too, if you seen webcams with gimbals well, this one works exactly like those and follows your face around except it kept turning off for me when I was connected to my Mac, although it worked okay for Sean on his windows, hopefully It’S a software fix might be a user error, we’ll see and good job on DJI for giving us software updates here, as well. Initially slow motion at 120 frames per second wasn’t available in delog m, just normal color, but as of last updates, you can now shoot 120 frames per second in dlog m, so keep those coming.
Lastly, the boot up, speed of this device is quite impressive. From the moment you flip, the screen to being able to record is less than 3 seconds. It’S such a reliable little device which will make your friends wait on you come with us you’re in lowy, filming digital Zoom is here, and I did not use it at all, because I don’t think it looks good if DJI wants to make a pocket Pro with Optical zoom or two lenses, I’m all ears. Above all, I enjoy the pocket 3.
So much because of how simple and Blain fun it is to use it turns on quickly. It is easy to carry around it, has great image quality and has great sound quality. I didn’t even mention that, but this thing has like three microphones all over the body. It has noticeable depth to field and I can get Clips.
I normally couldn’t get with my phones without a dedicated gimbal. It is a very versatile camera, DJI cramed in so much into this, for so many different use cases. Typically, I Associated the pocket series as just for vloggers, but now it can be used for a lot more, even if you want to use it just as a webcam, I would recommend it. I hate myself for even going down this road, but the old adage says that the best camera is the one that you have on you and I felt myself taking this one everywhere.
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