The Osmo Pocket has a strange behaviour when walking with it. I am not sure if this is inherent or if it is a defect in the control loop. I don’t recall seeing this with any stabiliser I have used before. I am never likely to be using it in this mode, but surely most of the market will, especially doing walking selfies…
It turns out that the above issue is normal, possibly made more visible by the narrow angle (relative to most action cams) of this camera.
I’ve been testing it on the ski slopes and it is the best I have used so far. Not the best camera for dynamic range (the Sony X3000 probably does that, beating any mobile phone, but like phones is relatively poorly stabilised) and not the best for stabilisation (the DJI Mobile stabilised phone holder produced a better job) but best overall.
The dynamic range is just the “cheap” sensor they use. There is no manual exposure mode AFAIK so one cannot underexpose and then post-process in a video edtior (the usual way of much improving mobile phone material).
The stabilisation is excellent against camera movement, but a stabilised camera does need to respond to external movement otherwise it will be impractical to use. The Osmo Pocket responds to lateral (left to right) movement but almost not at all to vertical (up and down) movement. That is normally ideal for action work. It supports a manual adjustment for the vertical, using either the touch LCD (very fiddly) or just by forcing the pitch gimbal. The only issue is that the sideways movement is not smooth enough; it jumps around a bit.
How it compares with the original DJI Osmo would be interesting.
I have done both 4K 60fps (which it copes with without losing data, even using a cheap slow 200GB micro SD card which absolutely won’t work in any 4K action cam; this shows DJI did the buffering properly) and HD 60fps, and if one is rendering to HD then I cannot see the difference, and the editing works much better. Most video editors don’t edit 4K directly internally; they edit a proxy. It would be only if doing zoom etc that 4K shooting would be useful. Lens correction is not required because there is no visible distortion – a huge advance from all the other action cams.
There are two settings for the stabilisation: fast follow and slow follow. The fast follow mode doesn’t produce a good result…
You can adjust the DJI Osmo pocket: pro mode, then manually adjust the exposure, etc.
Hmmm I have a feeling this is accessible only from an attached phone, and the phone has to be a USB-C model. I cannot get any connectivity with my Samsung S7 which is micro-USB, using a converter.
That feature is only for an attached phone, indeed. Not sure which models of phones and adapters are support at the moment.
Here is a high quality video which used a stabilised video camera.
Yes that is exactly the sort of application I had in mind.
You just need to find a way to externally mount it, and remotely control the zoom/pan because these things tend to have a “mind of their own” so you can’t just set them up and go flying.
I have spent the week testing the Osmo and it is pretty good.
The stabilisation is great, though it needs to be set to “slow follow” rather than “fast follow” which tends to produce strange jumps. It also needs the pan (pitch) adjustment wheel accessory; setting the pitch using the existing methods is horrible.
A neat feature of the Osmo Pocket is that it works equally, and completely transparently, upside down, i.e. like this
The recorded video is exactly like normal; no need to do anything in editing.
That mode could be quite applicable to mounting under an aircraft, obviously inside some sort of glass “dome” for protection from the airflow. Not sure one could “swing” that on a certified type however 
I am trying to get my hands on a USB-C equipped phone, for the extra config.
The latest firmware for the Osmo Pocket has brought the PRO (manual settings) mode accessible via the camera menu i.e. without having to use a phone to configure it.
The way to access it is obscure and is made worse by the horrible little LCD touch screen which is hard to use without inadvertently changing some settings.
You can now set the shutter (which is a fake shutter, with all these little CCD/CMOS cameras) and the ISO. If you set the shutter to say 1/100 (supposedly the best for smooth motion for 50fps) and set the ISO to 100 (the best for quality) you then have no latitude for exposure, so will have to use ND filters to control the exposure. If you set ISO to AUTO you have less work to do, but will be risking grainy images if the ISO goes to a few hundred (this is not a high-end DSLR ).
I think with an ND32 it will be ok for a sunlit snow scene…
