DJI Announces Super-Tiny Osmo Pocket 3-Axis Stabilized Camera

DJI is known for making drone aircraft, but that’s taught the company a few things about cameras. It’s released a few handheld cameras and related accessories, but the new Osmo Pocket is the smallest handheld stabilizer it’s ever offered. With 3-axis stabilization, you can swing the Osmo Pocket every which way and still get passably smooth footage at 4K resolution.

DJI calls this the Osmo Pocket because it’s tiny compared with the last Osmo camera or similar cameras from other companies. It stands a mere 4 inches tall and weighs 116g. The larger Osmo camera used a Zenmuse camera as seen in DJI’s high-end drones. To shrink the new Osmo to fit in a pocket, it used a camera module from the compact Mavic Air drone.

The device works as a standalone camera, but you’ll be stuck with the minuscule LCD. That’s the flip side of making it small enough to slip in a pocket. Luckily, the Osmo Pocket pairs with something else you might have in your pocket: a phone. The device comes with both USB Type-C (Android) and Lightning (iPhone) attachments. You plug in the phone, which acts as a larger display for shooting video and controlling settings.

DJI’s Mimo app for Android and iOS lets you create edited videos with features like Story Mode, which stitches together multiple short video clips. Mimo also helps transfer videos from the camera to your phone. This is all in addition to the shooting controls and live viewfinder.

Osmo Pocket is available for purchase today, but it’s not quite ready to ship. If you drop $350 on the gimbal camera, it should ship by Dec. 15. That’s spendy, and you don’t get all the features you might want for that price. There are add-ons like a Wi-Fi module, mount, charging case, and so on. There’s no internal storage, either. You’ll have to pick up a microSD card to actually record any video, and it better be a big one. At 100 Mbps, you’ll fill them up fast.