Hi everybody, welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV.
In this episode I'm going to
be talking about this little guy it's
the new Osmo Action.
It's the pocket camera that has a
front-facing screen, so you can see what
you're doing.
Well let's get right to it, what makes
the Osmo action an awesome camera?
There are tons of features in this camera that
I've sort of put it through its paces.
I've had this little action camera for
about a month now, and I tried it in
different scenarios...
underwater in crazy rain on my
motorcycle, walking, using it
as a vlogging camera,
using the internal audio.
I just try to test everything to
use it as you would normally use it in
the real world.
So let's talk about some
of the features that set this apart.
The first one is...
it has a front facing camera...
so right on the front, there's a
full HD screen, and so you can actually
see what you're doing either from the
back screen, or the front screen, and so
if you're using this as a vlogging
camera, you need to sort of frame
yourself up.
You can do that just fine or
you can use the back screen to see
exactly what's going on..
So you can just hit this little button on the
side, it'll flip that around, and now you can see
what's going on from the back.
It's really cool, the other thing that's
really nice about this camera is,
there's a button on the side here,
that's called the QS button...
that's the quick, quick,
switch button, and what that allows you
to do is, change between modes, and so if
you just click it once, you go to video mode.
Click it again, you go to HDR video,
you go to slow-motion, hyperlapse,
whatever, you can set that up and
customize it.
The cool thing about this
button is, if you're using gloves, so if
you're on a... snow, like snowboard,
or you're skiing.. or you're a snowmobile, or
you're on a motorcycle, or you're
doing anything.
You have gloves you can
actually can control this camera
switching modes, and doing things with
gloves on, and I love that.
The other thing this little side button does
is - if you hold it for just a couple seconds it
switches from the back camera, to the
front camera, so that's really easy, and
it's really really fast.
All right now, let's talk about some of the
things that really matter.
The first one is stabilization,
this camera has something
called rock steady, and it is incredibly
good, and so just to give you a sense of
how good this is.
I walk down the pier here with the camera
handheld, with just a normal setting,
and you can see that it
is all over the place,
because I'm holding that with my hand.
So then I went back and all I did was I
turned on Rocksteady,
and did the same exact walk,
and you can see that now,
this is smooth as butter.
It is gimbal like, and so it is
super smooth, in fact
because it corrects all of the axes, it
actually looks a little bit better
walking than my Osmo Pocket,
which I was very surprised about.
So this is gimbalish...
not a gimbal, but it's so darn close.
It's really sort of crazy, now I'm using
the front facing camera to frame up my
shot to make sure I am actually in the frame.
I also am using the built in audio
so it's not horrible...
probably a external audio device works
a little bit better, also face oriented
exposure turned on, and so you can see
that it does a pretty good job of making
sure I'm exposed.
But even with the bright background like
this, you can see that I'm not exactly
exposed correctly,
but it does a pretty impressive job.
We're about... oh an hour or so, before Sun
is going down.
We've got a lot of clouds out there,
so the contrast between my
face in the background isn't extreme,
but it is enough.
That would normally give a
GoPro or other little camera some issues,
so I'm really impressed with this camera.
I'm impressed with how stable it is,
it's very similar to using a gimbal.
It's sort of wacky and crazy,
The other thing that I think that is
amazing about this
camera that doesn't get a lot of hype is...
this front little screen here, it is
water repellent, and so I was astonished,
I was riding through heavy rain on my
motorcycle and I was really loving the
fact that even though this thing was
just getting drenched in rain,
it was just falling right off the front of that lens.
Let's talk about a couple other
things, one of the things that I love
about this, it just came out, it's a new
feature with the firmware update called
Hyperlapse, now what Hyperlapse
allows you to do is it's sort of like
time lapse, but the difference is this.. is
for having your camera move and
recording things over time, and so you
can do things like zipping through the
curves on your motorcycle, and you could
speed that up, you can do a little
walkthrough which I did.
And there are different speeds, so you
can do it 10 times as fast 15 times as
fast, or 30 times as fast.
So it really depends on what you're doing.
You get different effects using that,
and it's as simple as just choosing
Hyperlapse...
saying which speed you want,
and off to the races you go.
Another feature of this camera that I
absolutely love is HD, our
video you know what that allows you to
do if you have a really high dynamic
range scene, you can sort of compress those
things,
and get the highlights and the
shadows in one shot in the camera
without having to do a bunch of
post-production...
and so I tested that out
on just behind me here last night when
the Sun was going down, and here's the
scene that you can see.
This is just normal video,
and you can see that it's
got some problems with the highlights,
things are being blown out, but then what
I did was I just turned on HDR video,
shot the same scene, and wow what a
huge improvement.
That really changes the way
I see things.
I also did some tests and
some more dramatic scenarios when I was
in a cave doing some swimming in
Mexico, and you can see here the back is totally
blown out.
When I turn on HDR video it
does a little bit better job, it still
has some high-light problems, so it can't
solve every single HDR issue,
but it does a really, really good job.
Another feature of this camera that I love
it's called the DeWarp feature... now
wide-angle lenses like this,
are going to distort the scene and so on.
This camera what you can do is,
you can turn on something
called DeWarp.
What it will do is it will crop the frame,
but it will straighten things out,
and so here's a couple of
scenes I have...
here is one with DeWarp turned off,
and you can see it the edges,
things are just wonky, they're a little
bit curvy they look round...
turn on DeWarp, and you can see that
now everything is flat and horizontal,
and looks wonderful.
DeWarp I love it!
Another really cool feature of this camera is...
if you want to shoot videos for Instagram
and you need that vertical orientation,
well you just turn it like this, and now
you're in portrait mode, and the videos
are going to be saved in portrait mode,
and so you can shoot things, and then
post those straight to Instagram without
having to do any kind of post-production
rotation stuff.
It's really a time saver.
This is DJI's is a very first action
camera, and it's no surprise that it's
pretty awesome... because it's from DJI
but the question is are there any negatives...
and the answer is yes so the first one
that a lot of people are talking about
is this does not do live streaming, and
so that's something that is not right
now in this...
but the cool thing is with
the firmware update that could be
enabled...
So I wouldn't be surprised if
live streaming comes to this camera and
before Christmas...
so I don't know don't quote me on that,
but I'd be surprised if live streaming
doesn't come around very,
very soon.
The second thing and this is
one of the my gripes about this again,
this is something that could be solved
very easily.
There's no remote control
other than a smartphone, and so the
smartphone is amazing, because you've got
the MIMO application...
you can control everything on this little
camera from the smartphone,
but if you're skydiving
or zipping down a mountain on skis, or
you're on a motorcycle or snowmobile, or
something... you have this mounted to a
helmet or on your bike or somewhere else.
You can't use your smartphone... you need
some kind of little thing you can put on
your wrist to turn it on and off, or
maybe on your handlebars that doesn't
exist yet, and so I hope DGI it creates
that, and then one little persnickety
thing that kept getting me over and over,
is this little quick switch button on
the side... it's used for two things 1.
switching modes and 2.switching
between the front and rear camera.
I love it cuz you can use it with gloves...
it's all the rage I love that, but the problem
is if you don't hold it quite long
enough you can accidentally switch this
camera into the wrong mode, and so now I
have really learned to really be
deliberate when I push that button,
so I don't accidentally change from video
mode, to hyperlapse, or something else ..
and shoot unintentional video.
Now the question is Mark should I buy this camera?
And my answer is ...Absolutely! Yes.
I absolutely love DJI equipment....
in fact I shot this entire video using nothing but
my DJI Osmo pocket.
Every single shot that you see either
came from the Osmo
action or the Osmo pocket.. 100%.. DJI gear.
The thing that I love about this camera
is it's super easy to use it... shoots 4k
60 frames per second slow mo Hyperlapse.
Time-lapse... it does Stills it does
everything you could ever imagine out of
an action camera.
It's got a front-facing camera,
so you can use it for vlogging.
You can use external USB C compatible
adapters for external audio.
It just does everything, so yeah,
it's a no-brainer and this is the camera...
I think you should get if you want an
action camera.
Thank you so much for joining me for this
episode of Exploring Photography...
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