A critical view on DJI Osmo Mobile 2 Part II

In Part I we took look on the gimbal itsself and on the DJI Go App. Today in the second part we check the functions implemented in the gimbal/app combination.

If you like you can view the video with all my comments on this combination:

Foto/Video

The DJI Go app supports JPEG only for photography while the most native camera apps offer a pro mode, which allows it to cpature your image in DNG raw format. But the most common use of this combination should be captureing video clips. An with both the Samsung Galaxy S7 or the Huawei Mate 10 Pro i didn’t have any problems to utilise the hardware in full, which means 4K with 30fps on both cell phones. If you own a brand new cell phone which allos to capture videos in 4K at 60fps you might run into problems, because this mode is not supported so far. As a workarround you could use the native camera app on your phone.

Here is an example of a video to judge the stabilization:

Panorama function

The gimbal offers 3 different modes with the app

• UWW mode with 3×3 images
• 180° mode with 3×5 images
• Pano mode with 3×9 images

The images are captured in JPEG format and are stitched in the app. I tried 2 modes:

The app takes 3 rows while top most row is fixed set at +30°. It would be more flexible to set the top row just by moving up the cell phone to the desired postion. The fixed mode leads to results in UWW mode where the top of the buildung might not completly covered while on the other hand there is too much of the foreground in the final image, which could lead into stitching errors. The size of the resulting images is pretty ideal to post the images on social media. The stitching quality is very good, at least as long to pay attention to the foreground because the gimbal isn’t a nodal adapter. Because of the construction of the gimbal it is not possible to capture a sphere because horizontal angel is 330° only.

Just in case you need a higher resolution of your panorama images there is a solution. Just like with the Mavic Pro drone the app stores all base images in full resoultion of the panorama in a seperate folder. This allows you to download the full size images and stitch the panoram on your desktop computer using ICE or any other pano tool.

Timelapse mods

The offers different timelapse mods. Basically images are captured at a certain intervall which are rendere to a video clip. If in addition the camera is moved while captureing the base images we normally talk about a hyperlapse. On my photography blog you can a look on different versions of timelapse videos. With a DSLR or a system camera the effort to do a hyperlapse video is pretty, in particular doing an HDR hyperlapse.

At this point the app/gimbal combination promises to make it very easier for you. Just placing the gimbal on a tripod set the interval and the duration of the timelapse clip can be done in a couple of seconds. This is not much less effort compared to a systemcamera and probably a cable release.

It gets more exciting by planning  the gimbal to do a pan-shot where 2 or more points to go to are defined in the app:

Doing such a motion timelapse you should plane the gimbal on top of tripod, so you’re better of to carry at least a small tripod with you.

Doing a hyperlapse you will benefit from the gimbal function because the camera or better the cell phone will be balanced all the time. This in combination with active tracking will get you perfect video clips.

Here the gimbal functions are striking but there is big problem. Timelpase video clips are rendered in the app. But the app renders tese clips on my new Huawei Mate 10 Pro with 720p only, while on the Galaxy S7 the app will do 1080p. If xyou’re looking for 4k timelapse clips just forget it, at least on Android cell phones. This is too bad but hopefully DJI will update the app.

Conclusion

I just list the pros and cons of this combination:

Pros

• video stabilization very good/good
• Pano mods easy to handle
• multiple time-/hyper-/motionlapse modes
• long lasting battery
• fairly priced

Cons

• transport distance for a single gimbal
• registration enforcement
• Powerbank function not usable on larger cell phones
• setup tup row for the pano capture
• support for raw images
• Timelapse functions in 720p or 1080p only

[UPDATE]

Even the updates version of the app from June 29th (Version 3.1.42), which mentions the  Huawei Mate 10 Pro as a supported device there is no change for the different timelapse functions. The combination will stick to a maximum of 720p

In particular the last 3 points of the cons list should be improved by DJI with the highest priority, but to implement 4K for all timelapse modes is most important too me.

ciao tuxoche