DJI’s Action Cam Is Ready for Any Condition
I’m at the “Brooklyn Zoo” and the animals are jumping from ledge-to-ledge. One leaps over my head and I adjust my position. I want to get the best shot.
Those animals are all young men, parkour experts to be exact, and they’re leaping, diving, flipping and running up walls in a parkour gymnasium called “Brooklyn Zoo” in Brooklyn, NY. I’m there recording it all with a palm-sized action cam from DJI called the Osmo Action.
Unveiled on May 15, this is DJI’s first action camera and is just another step in its quest to conquer action photography in the air and on the ground.
At a glance, the $349 Osmo Action could be mistaken for a GoPro. It’s blocky with a lens on front and a big touch screen on back. But DJI adds a few important touches, including a 1.4-inch front facing screen, which might make it the ultimate action selfie cam.
Rugged, solid feeling (but not heavy), and ready to wear, hold or attach to a stick, the Osmo Action is built to go where the action is. DJI rates it for water operation up to 36 feet, without the need for a pressure/waterproof case. It can also handle dust, cold and heat.
I didn’t have the opportunity to take the Osmo Action for a swim, but did shoot with it out in the rain, which it handled just fine. Then I submerged it in water and captured a little video. That went, ahem, swimmingly, as well.
On the top of Osmo Action is a physical power button and to the right of it is an instant record button. As the name implies, even if Osmo Action is off, you can start recording immediately simply by pressing that button. There’s another button on the left side, called QuickSwitch, for rapid access to shooting modes, including slo-mo, HDR and Time-lapse. (You can customize which presets appear on the list in settings.) It comes in especially handy if you’re shooting underwater and can’t access the touch-screen gestures.
Speaking of the touch screen, it’s relatively intuitive. Swiping up from the bottom sets shooting quality (up to 4K at 60 fps), swiping from the left accesses playback. Swiping from the right accesses manual camera settings like focus and ISO level. You access settings by swiping down from the top.
The, gray, palm-sized video camera was the perfect tool to capture the twists, jumps, turns and dives of the parkour team. Owing to its size, I could get super-close to the action without getting in the way. All the parkour performers were wearing Osmo Actions, too.
Osmo Action’s wide-angle but not fisheye lens lets me capture the action and surrounding environment without significant distortion. It’s also appears ready to handle the quick-change exposure conditions you might encounter in an action shoot. For instance, the Brooklyn Zoo was full of natural, but uneven light. However, as I switched from front to backlit parkour performers, the camera quickly adjusted. There were times where it threw someone into silhouette, but its exposure adjustments were fast and sure.
Since DJI handed me the camera with only the briefest instructional walkthrough and no handbook, I had to figure how to use Osmo Action on my own. It went pretty well. I tended to use the instant record button a lot, with the mode switch a close second. It took me a little while to figure out that you have to press the mode switch once to access the quick switch and then again to choose the mode you want.
Swiping up from the bottom of the screen to adjust recording quality was easy enough. The adjustments are pretty simple so you can make fast changes without getting lost in the technical weeds.
I shot a lot of 240 fps slo-mo video, which looked amazing, a bunch of 4K, and 1080p normal speed video. Photos is one of the QuickSwitch options, though if you plan on taking selfies, you’ll want to use the front screen. With enough light, the camera takes decent, ultra-wide, 12MP photos, and you can choose to shoot in JPEG or JPEG+RAW. There was some notable graininess in low light.
You can double tap the large screen with two fingers to instantly switch to the front-facing screen, though this was a move that I never quite mastered. Later I used that mode and the quick record button to take a few selfies. The front screen is small, which means it’s pretty hard to make out even your own face on the screen. It was, however, easy enough to read the QuickSwitch options, and I toggled through them to get to “Photo.”
Virtually all my Osmo Action footage looked smooth as butter thanks to the integrated Rock Steady electronic image stabilization technology. Unlike optical image stabilization, which allows the lens to float free from the motion of the camera, Rock Steady uses software and some very clever cropping to ensure that the video is smooth even if your hand or mountain bike isn’t.
It takes approximately 88 minutes to recharge the battery via a USB-C port. (The port is hidden next to the microSD card slot under a sliding panel). Battery life is rated to just under 2 hours per charge, which pretty much matched my experience.
Wireless connectivity is achieved via DJI’s new Mimo App. It allows you to stream video directly from the camera to the phone. Unfortunately, I had trouble connecting my Osmo Action to my phones. DJI did warn me that the software build on my preview device wasn’t final. My guess is a quick firmware and app update will solve this.
In building the Osmo Action, DJI clearly applied the same care as it did with its industry-leading drones and the Osmo Pocket ultra-portable gimbal. The selfie-screen is a nice extra, even if, at a certain distance, you can barely tell what you’re looking at.
Overall, Osmo Action — which arrives May 22 — is easy to use, ready for challenging environments, produces high-quality content and is competitively priced. What more can you ask for from a wearable action camera?
DJI Osmo Action arrives on May 22.
DJI’s Action Cam Is Ready for Any Condition
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