DV Info Net - Dji osmo

After a few hours of troubleshooting, found the source of my Osmo's erratic behavior. Upon booting it up, I would see picture on my iPhone, then it would cut out, then it would come back. I removed the gimbal head from the handle and lo and behold, there was a small piece of lint or paper in the area of the handle where the gimbal screws into it. There are small circuit boards that allow the handle to talk to the gimbal and vice versa, and evidently the small piece of lint/paper was blocking the transmission between the two. I removed the small piece of paper and now it behaves fine. Robin, have you removed the gimbal from the handle to check for this?

Images, to me, look about the same as the GoPro, not great but usable for a few seconds here and there. The fan is on most of the time and is pretty noisy, agreed. This will not be a dialog camera. I shot 1080 24p, it looks good but when I switched to 4k, I too see these microjitters when playing images back from the memory card on my late 2012 i7 iMac. I agree, the 4k images actually look worse than just shooting 1080 for 1080 use, at least so far, they seem noisier and more compressed. I ran out of time to really put this thing through it's paces but it seems like a fun toy at this point, that I will occasionally use for work. Not a pro piece of gear, relatively fragile, but a consumer level piece of gear that can sometimes be leveraged for pro work. I had to calibrate the horizon, it was definitely biased toward the left.

I have to say, after playing with this, if I had it to do over again, I would consider a Go Pro Hero Silver and one of the newer, better gimbals as just as good, possibly better, and definitely more versatile. The sound is terrible on this, the images, to me look the same as a modern Go Pro and the integration that I thought would be so cool is okay but not much better than Go Pro. Plus, if you are familiar with Go Pros, there is a familiarity there that this lacks. Seeing the image on your phone is good but their silly phone bracket will not hold my iPhone with the battery case on it, it falls out and either way I mount the iPhone, the bracket wants to hit the power button so it accidentally shut down my phone several times. The software is okay, but nothing great, needs some refinement. So my iPhone 5S without the battery pack will not last very long while using their app, perhaps 45 minutes. The phone bracket is only designed for THIN smartphones, so if you have much of a protective case or a battery case, forget it, you are going to have to strip your phone to use it with this thing.

I will probably keep this but may end up buying a Go Pro Hero Silver anyway as for certain things, this will be better but for other things, the Go Pro will still be superior. I bought the two lens filter DJI setup, one UV and one ND (it didn't say what ND level the filter is.) I tried it outside and it works okay but I wish they made Vari NDs in this tiny size. This helps but in bright mid-day sun, this is still not enough ND to operate at ISO 100, 1/50th shutter, I still ended up having to put the camera at something like 1/320th shutter, which I don't like. Out of a score of 1-5 stars, I give the Osmo 3 stars. It's nicely engineered, the integration is cool, using a smartphone as a control screen is clever but overall, this definitely feels like V 1.0, it needs refinement, the fan noise is obnoxious and ever present, as usual, audio is a distant afterthought, I don't even think you could use a wireless mic unless the talent was about 15-20' from camera. Even for bloggers, the sound sucks, you would have to use a wireless or 2nd system sound. The phone bracket is ill conceived, they should have made the phone depth variable by spring loading the support pads on the back of the phone so thin phones wouldn't flop around and thick phones or phones with battery cases could be used. The gimbal itself functions well, the motion is smooth and usable although perhaps it is just me but it will take a while to get the hang of smoothly keeping moving subjects in frame and framed correctly, still learning how to do that but I have only used it once and the only moving subject I had was my cat following me around so perhaps something larger like a person would be easier?

If you are thinking about getting one, just be aware of all of the limitations. It's definitely not the be-all, end-all in small gimbals, but it is quick to setup and deploy at half of the cost of a Ronin-M and it includes the camera. Picture is just okay, compression is pretty severe and audio is lousy. More feedback as I get some time later this week to really put this through it's paces. Editing hell this week through Wed, then a two day writing gig. I really need a full day to see all of the things this can do.