DJI, the manufacturer synonymous “drones,” who has applied its gimbal technology to gimbals for DSLRs, compact handheld cameras and has even found footing in the wireless microphone market has finally released a 360-action camera over a decade after the first movers. Here are some thoughts before you hit purchase.
It was only a matter of time before DJI came out with a 360 camera. The last time I found myself in the action camera world was in 2015 with the GoPro Hero 3+ Black Edition and when mounting two fish eye, 180o cameras stitching the video together in post was how you achieved a 360o video…wow have things changed. The image quality, battery time, low light performance, slow-mo and all other specs and features of the Osmo 360 are without a doubt top of the line. Though I have yet to get my chance to use the Osmo 360 in the wild, based on the specs and DJI’s reputation, I think the Osmo 360 will be good. Yet the video DJI released upon its announcement raises a handful of questions and pokes at what could make the difference between good and great.
My first experience with DJI was with the Phantom 3 series which required a DJI flight app on your phone to view the camera feed and control everything on the drone outside of the joysticks, gimbal wheel and the essential aircraft functions via the s1 and s2 toggle switches. With so much information coming through the phone, I made a holder on the back of the controller to carry a battery pack to charge my iPhone knowing it was normal to lose ~50% of my phone’s battery from just one flight. Yes, phone batteries and DJI’s technology has come a long way over the last decade, yet I remain pessimistic about how efficiently you will be able to run DJIs Mimo app to edit and “reframe after your 360 shot, all on your phone.”
Another factor to consider in this equation is that when batteries are exposed to extreme elements, performance declines and running a heavy video editing app would only increase this strain. Furthermore, the video highlights this feature with cyclists who I imagine are using their phone to play music, running an app to track their ride, and is probably their only from of technology that could help them in an emergency especially as a solo rider.
In the same vein, and possibly the most interesting feature was the “instant” syncing of your activity stats via your smart watch during the recording to be displayed on the video playback. There are a few potential choke points I see with this. I) Watch OS still remains a step behind iOS and MacOS in terms of overall intuitiveness, II) the Osmo 360 will be compatible with other smart watches and III) its DJIs hardware, not software, that has solidified them as the Rolls Royce of drones. When you consider the short comings of DJIs software combined with the deficit in intuition of Watch OS, and the need for the DJI software to also be compatible with non-apple operating systems rather than perfecting the integration with one smartwatch software, I can only imagine the technical difficulties to follow.
Beyond the forecasted technical troubleshooting, the result is a video with your stats displayed on the perimeter of the frame. But how much flexibility will I have as a user with this feature? Will differing smartwatch softwares capture the same data to fill the perimeter of stats? If not, will that stat show up as “- -” or “N/A,” or will it be smart enough to adjust the lay out accordingly and prevent these gaps? What if I am a terribly slow rider and don’t want to show my speed throughout the video, or a beautiful sunset is happening on the right third of the frame, what freedom will users have to adjust the look and composition of the stats displayed? Though no feature, especially that on a new product, is perfect on its first iteration and am excited to see how consumers react and how DJI responds and improves on the next version.
DJI also looks to be pulling a page out of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook’s book and beginning to nurture an ecosystem that not only sneaky sucks you in, but slams the unscalable gate shut once you’ve entered, littered with unpickable locks just like Apple. The video first alludes to this still evolving ecosystem mentioning the “[pairing of the Osmo 360] with the DJI mic series for studio quality audio.” The DJI mic is to DJI’s Inspire 3 as AirPods are to the iPhone. To many the iPhone is Apple – and vice versa, the flagship product. AirPods could be used with non-Apple products. Yet, they purposefully designed to work seamlessly with Apple products, and Apple products alone. With this comparison in mind, you don’t need other DJI products for the DJI mic to serve its purpose. But will DJI make it more tedious to connect or limit features with non-DJI action cameras and other non-DJI products – bolstering the walls to the garden and promoting other DJI hardware and software?
The genesis of this ecosystem continues to evolve and gain legs. Features such as the activity stats mentioned above and the “intelligent tracking” also mentioned in the video for now seem to be confined to DJIs Mimo and Studio editing software’s. If you want the features you saw in the release video, you’ve seemingly already committed yourself to using DJIs software. To add another element to this, I have yet to meet anyone who is in the market for an action camera that doesn’t use an Adobe or Apple suite video editing software. Will these unique features make it to these programs (with adobe presenting itself as the favoured candidate as DJI runs and android based software)? The files that store your 360 videos are also unique to DJI. Is there something in this file that will cause undue troubleshooting for Adobe and Apple users, ushering them to Mimo and Studio?
As I briefly touched at the beginning of this article, DJI is a drone company that continues to dominate the US market and as a result has become synonymous with “drones.” They’ve translated their outstanding gimbal technology to a platform supporting DSLRs and continued to expand further into the imaging and content creation industry with their handheld stabilizers for cameras, microphones and now the Osmo 360. I look forward to shooting with the Osmo 360, experiencing the hardware and software as advertised in the situations its depicted in and hope for my early assumptions to be proven wrong. For the time being, as DJI continues to build up the walls to their garden, software remains at the crux of potential consumer dissatisfaction, even from inside the walls. It will only be a matter of time before we can say if their ecosystem business model play was a success. However, that notion is squashed if DJI cannot produce software to complement their exceptional hardware.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments