In my recent review of the DJI Osmo Action 3, some of the footage looked really good and it
looked crisp, and it looked sharp when there was lots of sunlight, and even sometimes when it was a
bit overcast, but then in other scenarios even the footage that was shot when it was really bright
looked quite mushy, and this is a problem that a lot of people have had and so one of the things
I wanted to do was do a few tests to see whether certain fields of view or the stabilization has
anything to do with it. Even though I’m not trying to make excuses for poor quality but I just wanted
to see if there's anything in those settings that would make a difference, so in this video
I'm going to do a few tests with field of view and image stabilization and then also using a gimbal,
and if you want to kind of skip the tests that I'm about to show you then you can use the chapters
in the description and just go straight through to the result of what I've kind of found out, and the
best things that you can do in the meantime until potentially DJI fix any of these focusing issues.
So the first thing that I noticed was that if you shoot in the standard field of view it's
going to give you lower quality than if you shoot in the wide or super wide field of view, and it's
actually quite noticeable when you look closely at it. The other thing that I noticed was that image
stabilization also gives you a lower quality image so if you have RockSteady or HorizonBalancing on
it's going to give you lower quality than if you were to switch image stabilization off, and this
is probably due to the fact that RockSteady and HorizonBalancing actually crop in so
that's potentially why that's happening, it's also worth mentioning that the minimum focusing
distance is 30 centimeters so 0.3 meters and even though I was pretty much doing this throughout
the review video, so I was holding my arm up quite far, that's why I did this test to see
whether that also made a difference to maybe I was not doing that in my review. It's also
worth noting that in my review video a lot of the footage that I shot was in the standard field of
view and the reason that I tend to use that is because I want the minimum amount of distortion.
With all that said I only really got the softness sometimes and only when I was
really close in the frame. When I was shooting my b-roll the soft look wasn't really an issue
nor when I was out on my paddleboard, so even though the minimum focusing distance
is 30 centimeters it actually seems quite inaccurate and it seems that you need a lot
more than 30 centimeters to get decent looking, crisper footage, because the footage was a lot
better when I was holding the Action 3 out further in front of me, a bit more distance.
I'll most likely use my Insta360 selfie sticks it extends out to 120 centimeters however because I
noticed such a difference in quality with RockSteady and HorizonBalancing on versus
it being off I'm likely just going to turn stabilization off completely and just use a
gimbal, and even though the gimbal isn't going to be as smooth as the stabilization I don't
mind it too much whilst I'm walking and talking if it means I'm going to get crisper footage,
it doesn't look horrendous and the camera shake is so minimal. I'm also going to have to use a gimbal
anyway when I use ND filters, and Freewell actually have some ND filters available now
for the Action 3, they sent me some and so I'll put a link in the description to where
you can get those. The other thing is that I might actually go for shooting in wide rather
than standard because even though standard looks more normal in terms of less distortion
from what I saw wide just looked better in terms of the quality of the footage anyway, so if I'm in
nature or somewhere which is quite open and wide you're not really going to see that distortion so
much. So yeah, I'll definitely look at using wide more in that situation for now anyway.
So there definitely seems to be an issue and I really hope that a firmware update is going to
improve it because when the footage is good and on point it looks really good and it's
kind of the biggest thing that lets the camera down at the moment because everything else is…
I really like it and yeah so hopefully a firmware update is going to do the job,
but anyway I hope this video was useful for you, if it was do give it a like,
and subscribe if you want to see more videos because I do have more videos coming out about
the Action 3, but also the HERO11 if that is something that you're interested in as well,
and I did a review on that so check that out, but thanks for watching and catch you next time.