I’ve been testing the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 ahead of launch and I am blown away

Price and Availability

There are three versions of the DJI Osmo Pocket 4. They include:

Osmo Pocket 4 Standard Combo (£445) includes:

• Osmo Pocket 4, USB-C to USB-C PD Cable (USB 3.1), Osmo Pocket 4 Gimbal Clamp, DJI Wrist Strap, Osmo Pocket 4 Handle with 1/4″ Thread, and Osmo Pocket 4 Portable Carrying Pouch.

Osmo Pocket 4 Creator Combo (£549) includes:

• Includes everything in the Standard Combo plus the Osmo Pocket 3 Wide-Angle Lens, DJI Mic 3 Transmitter, DJI Mic 3 Magnetic Clip, two DJI Mic 3 Windscreens, DJI Mic 3 Magnet, DJI Mic 3 Transmitter Magnetic Charging Cable, Osmo Pocket 4 Fill Light, Osmo Mini Tripod, and Osmo Pocket 4 Carrying Bag.

Osmo Pocket 4 Essential Combo (£429) includes:

• Osmo Pocket 4, USB-C to USB-C PD Cable (USB 3.1), Osmo Pocket 4 Handle with 1/4″ Thread, and Osmo Pocket 4 Portable Carrying Pouch.

There is currently no US pricing and no US availability through official retailers yet.

Design and Accessories

• Design is more of a refinement
• Get the Creator Combo to get all the accessories
• Extra physical controls

It’s safe to say that DJI has taken its time upgrading the popular Pocket series, but the company has stuck with a formula that very much works in the design department. 

It’s slightly longer and wider than its predecessor, and adds just over 10 grams to the weight, but otherwise it’s largely the same as before.

The display swivels 90 degrees so that you can use it in horizontal widescreen or vertical portrait setups. And this motion also serves as the power switch. It’ll wake up as soon as you flick it around to horizontal, and count down to powering off if you turn it back around to vertical. If you want to shoot vertically, you can cancel this countdown while it’s on screen. 

Rotating the display reveals the one notable change in design: the display is hiding two new buttons. One of those is the zoom button that you can press once or twice to zoom in and out of scenes. The other is a shortcut button you can customise, but defaults to taking a photo or centring the camera depending on whether you click it once or twice.

These add to the two physical controls carried over from the previous Pocket. There’s a joystick for controlling left and right panning or zooming, which can also be clicked inwards to reset and re-centre the camera. That’s joined by the usual movie record button indicated by the typical red ring. 

There are nice touches to make it easy to hold and use, like the soft-touch, textured, rubberised pad beneath the joystick and capture button and the diagonally-ridged surface on the back, both of which help ensure it won’t slip easily out of the hand. 

And while the joystick looks essentially the same as last time, it’s no longer a single-speed mechanism. So if you want to pan more slowly, you can be more precise with the joystick movement, pushing it less to produce slower, steadier movements. There’s also an option in the settings to adjust the panning speed.

Another design change is far more subtle than two new buttons: pogo connectors on the back of the gimbal head. The physical, electronic contact points allow the camera to pass power through to accessories attached to the head, like the new LED fill light that snaps magnetically onto the top of the Pocket 4 and immediately powers on. 

Any vlogger who wants to film themselves in low-light environments will definitely appreciate this. It’s got two buttons: one for brightness and one for white light temperature, with three settings for each button. That means three levels of brightness and three temperature settings. A little limited, but very easy to use. 

On that note, the fill light comes in the Creator Combo with the Pocket 4 alongside a selection of other accessories. These include the DJI Mic 3 transmitter unit, which is a single microphone that’s already paired with the Pocket 4 right out of the box. So you can turn it on, attach it to your shirt/jacket/whatever using the magnetic clip, or the small square magnet, and you’re ready to go. No pairing, connecting or messing about required.

You also get those little fluffy wind mufflers for the mic to passively kill wind noise or tone down any excessive peaking in your voice. 

The Creator Combo is DJI’s take on McDonald’s ‘go large’ marketing, and when you consider all the components, it certainly seems worth paying the extra to get all the additional goodies. Where the basic bare bones camera will set you back £429, the Creator Combo is £549 and comes with a lot of very useful extras. 

Those mic and LED light accessories are joined by a mount, which you clip to the bottom of the Osmo Pocket 4 and features a 1/4-inch thread for screwing it to the included mini tripod, or any traditional camera mount. 

It also means that if you have a particular set-up in your home studio/office environment, you can leave the mount permanently attached if you want, and just clip the camera on and off with a simple press of the quick-release button.

A battery pack is included that uses the same quick-release mechanism to add additional battery power to the Osmo Pocket. Useful for those times when you know you’re going to be recording a lot and don’t want to carry a beefy battery pack with you or mess around with additional cables. 

All these accessories can fit inside the soft case, with compartments, which also comes with the Creator Combo. It is worth at least mentioning the additional wide-angle lens, which, like last time, snaps magnetically to the front of the camera. But also, like last time, it doesn’t seem to expand the field of view that much from what is already a pretty wide-angle FOV. At a 20mm equivalent, the default view is already wider than most smartphones’ primary cameras, and that – any traditional photographer will tell you – is already very wide. 

Lastly, instead of shipping with a thin hardshell case to hold it steady while out of use, it has a gimbal clamp. It’s a small clip-on clamp that fits over the actual gimbal head to restrict its movement. And when it’s on, the camera knows it’s there, and can’t be operated, saving you from destroying the motors and gimbal mechanism. 

Features, Performance and Battery Life

• Increased transfer speeds
• Lots of excellent features
• Decent battery life

No matter how good the optical image stabilisation gets on smartphone cameras, they’ll never be quite as good as something like the DJI Osmo Pocket with its built-in gimbal, especially not when combined with the ActiveTrack feature. 

Having this mechanical arm that keeps the camera steady means it’s almost impossible to get shaky footage. It’s effectively like having a camera and a SteadiCam that’s small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. It’s actually rather magical, and I’d definitely prefer to shoot handheld video with this than with a bulky glass slab of a phone. 

Like the design and accessories, DJI has added to the capabilities of the DJI Osmo Pocket 4 in ways that meaningfully enhance the experience. The most obvious and prominent new feature is that it has just over 100GB of internal storage. In an age of expensive and scarce memory, that matters. You can use a microSD card in the physical slot if you want, but you don’t have to.

Thanks to another upgrade, namely increasing the wired transfer speeds, plugging the Osmo Pocket into your computer for transferring video files is also faster than before. Up to 10x faster in some scenarios, according to DJI. 

Anyone whose workflow includes using a desktop video editor will definitely appreciate that extra efficiency. For those who like specs,  it’s got up to 800MB/s wired read speeds thanks to support for USB 3.1, and supports Wi-Fi 6 for wireless transfer to the mobile DJI app. 

I didn’t use the mobile app much, but regularly plugged the camera into my desktop dock and transferred files to watch footage back on a bigger screen and to edit the video review, and found it quick enough that it was never an inconvenience. Certainly not noticeably slower than copying files from my proper camera’s SD card. 

For those without a good webcam, you can plug your DJI Osmo Pocket 4 into your PC or Mac, select webcam mode, and use it as a much better camera for your livestreams and virtual meetings, too. And with ActiveTrack enabled, make sure that if you’re moving while on the call, the camera moves with you to physically keep you centred in the frame.

And, in fact, ActiveTrack is DJI’s secret sauce. It’s what makes most of their products so good. It’s the company’s very clever object tracking technology and has been upgraded to version 7.0 to offer smoother and more reliable tracking. 

In use, it’s about as user-friendly as you could imagine. Just double-tap on a subject on the screen, whether that’s a person, skateboard, animal or any other object. It’s pretty smart at automatically figuring out what you’re trying to select, and will then reliably stay locked on to that subject. 

The only time I found it lost track of a subject or object was when it was moving a bit too fast, or came too close and too quickly towards the camera or out of the frame. But even then, there were times when it would find the object again if it came back into view. 

Facial detection and auto-focusing are also useful, allowing you to tap once on a subject to keep it in focus. And this works in webcam mode too, so your face will always be sharp, automatically, even if you’re not mechanically tracking it. In fact, if there’s a face in the scene, you won’t even need to tap it as it’ll detect the face and know that’s what it’s supposed to keep in focus. 

Battery life is very much dependent on what you shoot and which features, resolutions and frame rates you film in.

DJI’s specs sheet claims up to 240 minutes of continuous recording, but this is 240 minutes shot at 1080p/24fps with the display switched off. Shooting 4K/60fps with the screen on and using ActiveTrack will drain the battery much faster. 

As an example, shooting about 3-4 minutes of 4K/240fps with ActiveTrack enabled in the SLO setting was enough to drain 5-6% of the battery, suggesting less than 80 minutes of run time if you shoot exclusively in the highest resolution and frame rate. 

Still, the battery capacity has been increased from 1300mAh on the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 to 1545mAh, a difference which will be largely negated by the fact that it can shoot in more power-hungry resolutions, frame-rates and bitrates. And, as mentioned earlier, if you get the Creator Combo, you’ll get that additional battery pack to clip on the bottom, so it’s rarely a concern. 

Video, Audio and Photo Quality

• Improved sensor
• Excellent video in various situations
• Photos are ok, but far from a reason to buy

Just like so much of the Pocket 4, DJI upgraded the video and photo capture abilities. It replaced the 9MP sensor with a 37MP one, and increased its lowlight performance. 

But that’s not all, professional videographers or anyone who wants to colour grade, will be delighted to know that it can shoot in 10-bit D-Log. That means better colour data, and with the ability to shoot up to 4K at 240fps for slow motion capture, there’s a lot more flexibility here.

I tested this camera in several different scenarios, recording video and capturing still photos in daylight outdoor scenes, in low light with the night mode using it with and without the Fill Light, and indoors with dimmer light situations. And found it does the job in all of those situations pretty well. 

Left in its automatic mode, I found it was a bit dark and contrasty indoors with my studio lighting, but it was great once I took it outdoors. 

Most of my footage was shot at 4K resolution at 60fps, and it generally looks sharp, with good depth between me in the foreground and the background. It contained bright light sources pretty well too, and made colours vibrant and saturated without being hyperreal.

Even at night, with the night setting chosen, the video looked fairly decent. Without the Fill Light attached, I found it was a little noisy once the light levels dropped. Parts of the image got a bit grainy, but still, if you’re after a vibrant video at sunset or sunrise, this will give you that. 

If you’re filming yourself, I’d definitely recommend the Fill Light. You can get a pretty good balance in terms of brightness and warm/cool lighting, and means if you are filming in lower light, you can illuminate your face to ensure it’s not grainy or distorted without needing to carry a bulkier light with you.

The increased pixel count of the sensor has meant the Pocket does technically have sharper still photos than the previous model, but it’s still not much of a stills camera. In lower light I found it struggled with motion blur and focus a little – even with the gimbal steadying hand-motion.

But for video, that combination of the gimbal and the 1-inch type sensor means you can get great-looking footage most of the time. 

Its slow-motion mode is a huge draw to me, especially kicked into its battery-draining 240fps mode at 4K resolution. Shooting cherry blossom-laden branches under a tree and watching back at 1/8th of its speed is – quite frankly – delicious. And it’s brilliant for recording your cat’s reaction speeds, even if that reaction is coaxed out of it by a human overlord with a hair bobble. It’s so stable, smooth and colour-rich that I never felt the need to tweak or edit. 

For those who want to film with a ‘look’ or ‘vibe’ do have the option to switch between a few different colours and preset filters, along with beauty filters and smoothing options. Again, for anyone who wants that. That’s not me. 

Audio quality from the built-in mic is pretty solid, although not amazing at getting rid of background noise. For a more isolated sound, the clip-on DJI Mic 3 unit in the Creator Combo is a worthy investment. 

Unless you have a DJI Mic already, in which case you can pair it with the Pocket 4. On that note, the new Pocket 4 will let you record up to four channels of audio at once, and split them to make them individually adjustable in the edit.

Should you buy it?