Tag Archives: Action

DJI Osmo Action Camera

(This post is "natively" only available in English)

This post is about my new gadget, but this is not a product review. I have no commercial arrangements of any kind with the companies involved (or any other company for that matter).

So why am I writing this? To let you know I’ve updated some of my tech in an attempt to produce better videos in the future and hoping the process I went through to select this camera could be beneficial to others as well.

If you are looking for a review there are hundreds of highly competent people and companies specialized in this field nowadays. To me, this is just a tool for a purpose.

Use the links below to navigate to the part most interesting to you, if you don’t want to read the entire post:

    1. Reason for the upgrade.
    2. Why this camera?
    3. Reviews about this camera.
    4. Test Ride Videos with the Osmo Action
    5. The few Pictures (Photos) I took with the DJI Osmo Action

Reason for the upgrade.

Well, I’ve had many action cameras over the time I’ve been blogging. Even before the Blog I was already playing with the idea of recording bike rides and had a multitude of cheaper Chinese cameras just to play with, including a small Mini-DV camera, a Keyring camera and then a SJ1000, which was probably my first “real” action camera.

In 2015 as I decided to ride the French Way of the Camino de Santiago by bike, which was the motivational starter of this blog, I bought 2 new cameras: Initially a Sony HDR-AS30V, a mid-range Action Camera, which was to become my main action camera for a little over 1 year and a cheap SJ M10 from the same maker of the SJ1000, that today I use as my car’s Dashcam to record my journeys in case of an accident or similar (it’s small and works quite well). I blogged about these cameras in this post.

In 2016 as I was planning my Via Francigena bike ride to Rome, I then decided that I needed an upgrade as my main method of recording had become time-lapse mode and collating all the thousands of pictures generated by the Sony camera every 5 seconds (the lowest setting of the camera) was way too laborious and the results were disappointing to a certain extent. I was looking for a device that could record time-lapse videos i.e. take the pictures and stitch them altogether in the camera itself producing an “in camera” time-lapse footage and the GoPros of the time could do that. I then decided to buy a GoPro 4 Silver and not Black as both had this feature and it worked the same way in both, with the Black, being the higher end camera of the time, also capable of recording in 4K video mode, which I wasn’t very interested as I thought the significant price difference didn’t pay off.  The GoPro 4 Silver became my main action camera ever since and I believe I managed to capture really nice images with it, with the only problem being the very shaky images produced since the GoPro 4s had no digital image stabilization at all (silver or black, very odd). I wrote about this camera in this post.

In 2017 I made another upgrade to address that stabilization weakness which was the Feiyu FY WG 3 axis Wearable Gimbal which helped significantly reduce the shakiness while recording video (time-lapse or not). Practically all of my rides were recorded with this combination (GoPro 4 Silver mounted on a wearable gimbal) until August last year when I was riding the Portuguese Way of the Camino de Santiago and as I was about to leave Coimbra in the morning when I was mounting my bike with the camera and the gimbal mounted on a chest mount, I accidentally bumped the camera + gimbal into the handlebar with force and the gimbal stopped working and has never worked again. I think the stepless motors of the axis were burnt. Well, shit happens when you are on the road… 🙁

So, I had no alternative, but to continue recording the journey without any stabilization at all and when I came back I decided that for my next cycling adventure I needed an update to my tech, after all the GoPro 4 Silver is now a 5 years old technology and we all know how quickly things become obsolete in this area.

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Why this camera?

When I came back I had a lot of things to deal with in my professional life and I knew I wouldn’t be going on a new cycling adventure for a while, which gave me time to look for suitable alternatives at a price range I was willing to pay. From the start I looked into the GoPro product line for an alternative, but the nice thing for us consumers now is that this market is really saturated with options and in May 2019 a new company entered the action camera market which was DJI. Those who fly drones know this company well as they are the major drone manufacturers of the world.

Their device, called Osmo Action, had a similar spec to the GoPros, but a few interesting differences for people like me who would want to use their action cameras for other purposes as well, such as recording in “selfie” mode. The price difference of both offerings was not significant

I wasn’t in any hurry to buy a camera so I watched dozens of videos, not only of comparisons between the 2 cameras mentioned above, but also of other brands such as SJCam (the manufacturers of the cheaper action cams I started with). That made a decision only harder, to be honest. Even though cheaper Chinese manufacturers like SJCam offer fantastic options with lots of “Pro” features, I discarded going for one of them and turned my attention back to the market leaders as I focused on the requirements I had, the main one being the ability to record super stabilized videos in normal and time-lapse mode without the need of a mechanical gimbal and, among others, waterproofness, charging while recording, etc. Both cameras excelled in those, with the GoPro Hero 8 Black still having a slight edge on stabilization, it seems (it can, apparently, also stabilize HDR videos which the Osmo Action can’t).

Yet the DJI won me over because of the many positive reviews and videos I had seen, the improvements they made through firmware upgrades since launch and the fact that to capture still or videos in “selfie-mode” it has a little display in the front of the camera that allows you to frame the subject more easily without the need of a smartphone and its app, sorry GoPro… Also the fact that I am considering buying a drone in the future played a role in this decision.

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Reviews about this camera.

If you are interested in learning about the specs of the camera or independent reviews, you may use the links below, part of my own market research about what camera to buy. I won’t add reviews to the GoPro here as it wasn’t the one I decided to go for and therefore have no self-knowledge about it.

If you are really interested, I recommend you search for YouTube video reviews as well

  1. Tech Radar’s Review
  2. Trusted Review’s Review
  3. Trusted Review’s lastest comparison between GoPro Hero 8 Black and the DJI Osmo Action.

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Test Ride Videos with the Osmo Action

I received my new camera a couple of weeks ago, but during the current state of lockdown here in the UK I preferred not to go out on bike rides, even though a 1h out for physical exercise is permitted under the current rules. This past Saturday I decided I really needed to get out and I also had the perfect excuse to test my new gadget, so I recorded parts of the ride with the new camera, put a little video together and uploaded to YouTube.

Before you watch the video you must know that I the Micro SD card I was using on the GoPro 4 silver was too slow for the new camera (and the camera also warns about the card speed when turned on). I did buy a faster card, but it didn’t arrive in time, so although the camera did a wonderful job considering the card limitations, the resulting images might be affected by this fact.

I may record another test with the new card when it arrives.

The video below is a test of the Hyperlase recording mode of the camera. Recorded on the 6th of May 2020, two days after I published this blog post

The next video is a, “professionally produced”, marketing video done one year ago by DJI to introduce the device.

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The few Pictures (Photos) I took with the DJI Osmo Action

I took only 5 pictures as this isn’t the reason I bought the camera for.

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Hope this was helpful to you.

Thank you!


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EyeCycled went PRO! (well, sort of...)

Still far from being a PRO, but I now have a GoPRO… a GoPRO 4 Silver, to be exact.

So far I’ve been using essentially 2 action cams, which I have written about earlier: A Sony HDR-AS30V and a SJCam M10. Both had “goods” and “bads”, but after having done this for a while I thought I needed something better.

After some research I went for the GoPRO 4 Silver edition. I did consider the most expensive model, the Black Edition, for a while, but what won me over to the silver was the ability to see what the camera is filming without having to use a mobile phone over Wi-Fi or something else. The Silver has a touch sensitive LCD display on the back which makes configuring it a lot easier, in addition to actually showing the picture on display and being able to playback straight away.

The Black edition is more powerful, but I didn’t think I was going to start uploading 4K videos to YouTube any time soon.

I also wanted the ability to produce better time-lapse videos. On a long distance bike ride it usually takes many hours to get to the destination. No one, not even die-hard cycling fans, have the patience to watch it for that long (real cycling aficionados use to time to do the real thing, rather than watch it on a screen).

One of my biggest problems with the Sony and the SJCam was the minimum picture interval of 5 seconds. When going downhill, at higher speeds, 5 seconds covers a lot of distance. It becomes especially difficult to keep the notion of continuity if there are many curves or turns, so I was looking for a camera that could do it at intervals of at least 1 second. The newer GoPRO models not only can do it with a minimum interval of 0.5 second (in addition to intervals of 1, 2, 5, 10, 30 and 60 seconds), but it can actually create the video directly in the camera, with no editing needed. You get the real thing straight out of the camera… Great!  … and it does work!

One thing I’ve learned in life is that there are always “buts”…

So, it does work, BUT…

Thumbs-Up IconTime-Lapse Videos

I’ve learned that the desired 1 sec interval produces video which is way too fast for my taste. What I mean is, the camera takes take 1 frame (picture) each second, but when it produces the video it packs way too many frames per second (not sure how many really, haven’t checked, but must be between 15 and 24). With the 5 sec intervals of the Sony, I was producing time-lapse videos with 3 frames per second, which after many tests, seemed to produce the best results fir my “taste”. I couldn’t find a setting in the GoPRO to define how many frames per second you want the time-lapse video to contain. If anyone knows how to do that, please message me.

On the bright side, it eliminates the “continuity” issue I described above and produces a very “time compressed” 4K video in a small file size, for example a 13 minutes ride was compressed in a 22 seconds video. Some of my Camino de Santiago bike rides had something like a 6 hours duration or more. I can perhaps extrapolate that a 6 hours bike ride would be compressed to just over 7.5 minutes.

I have not tested this, but I believe if I increase the interval to 2 or 5 seconds I will end up with the same issue as described with the Sony camera and still unable to change the rate of frames per second the camera uses when creating the video.

The video below was produced by the camera (I only added the logo and titles in editing) at 1 second intervals on a 4K resolution. Note that YouTube reduces the quality of the original video.

There is also the option to actually configure the camera just to take and store the pictures and not to produce the video. I could then take the many thousands of pictures and produce the time-lapse video myself in a video editing software, as I have been doing, but that is one of the most boring things and that take the most time.

There are only 2 options in resolution. The massive 4K picture size, which means it produces a video of 3840 pixels width and 2160 pixels height. Although things are evolving fast, still most TVs and monitors cannot truly display that type of resolution and only recently YouTube added the 4K option to video uploads. The other option is a 2.7K video (2704 pixels width and 2032 pixels height) which is created in the 4:3 (square) ratio. I could definitively use this resolution, if it was on a wide 16:9 ratio, but not on the old 4:3 one.

thumbs-down-36-000000Video Recording

There are plenty of GoPRO videos in YouTube and it is not my intention to compete with the professionals in the area (either a professional YouTuber of camera man), but I had, obviously to do my own tests. I am massively disappointed by the fact the new top range GoPRO models do NOT have image stabilization. The Sony I use does and it is excellent. Even the old GoPROs (the HEROs) have image stabilization, so why did GoPRO remove this feature from their most expensive cameras is beyond me. They are supposed to be action cameras, right? And action usually means shaking. Yes, they say you can stabilize the video in editing later, but why do we have to go that extra work if this was already there on their previous models? This was a major let down! I am not returning the camera because of the lack of image stabilization, as I will be keeping my Sony Action Cam and will likely use it to record full HD videos and use the GoPRO mostly for the Time-Lapse option (even though there is no image stabilization in time-lapse either), but (let me say it again) this is a massive disappointment for something considered the best in the market these days.

The video below is a direct upload to YouTube of the video recorded by the camera. When I tried to edit the video to add the logo and title my video editing software produced only a green screen (perhaps some codec issue).

I found this video in YouTube while researching if there was anyway to get the camera do stabilize the image and I think the benefits are very clear here…

Well, that’s it! If this post was useful, please share, comment and let me know if you liked it or not by clicking on the rating stars below.

Thank you!

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Action Cameras for Cycling (Sony HDR-AS30V)

My 1st Gadget post… How exciting!
To save you time (?), this post is not really a typical product review. I prefer to leave this to specialists, such as Techmoan, who is my favourite reviewer for these things. This post is rather an account of my personal experiences and impressions with my current Sony camera and a few others I´ve owned over the years. So, if you are looking for a good product review or you don´t like reading, please watch Techmoan´s reviews on the Sony Action Cams or the many others he has on his site. Keep in mind the review below is really for the Sony HDR-AS10/15 models while mine is a newer AS30V, but they are almost identical:

He has also made a comparison video between the Sony AS10 and the GoPRO Hero3.

I´ve always been sort of a geek. Less so in more recent years, however, once a geek always a geek, it seems. And in my geeky interests one of the things that I have always been keen about was cameras (video recording). I acquired my first ever digital camera in 1998 (a Fujifilm DX-10) while on a trip to the US and it it´s max resolution was 0.8 megapixel (1024×768 pixel), could not record videos, had a 2 MB (not GB) SmartMedia card (later I bought 8 and 16 MB cards) and a RS232 serial interface for (slowly) transferring the pictures (this was before USB). This camera was stolen in Brazil in 2002 when the entire bus I was travelling in with everyone in it was kidnapped and held hostage by criminals for almost 3h (thankfully no one got hurt).

Mini DV Camera
Mini DV Camera

Not accounting for the many consumer photo/video cameras I had along the years, there have been those I bought specifically to record activities such as car trips and bike rides.

Keyring Camera
Keyring Camera

Years ago I bought a very cheap Mini DV camera such as this one. Few months later I bought a keyring camera like this. Their size was ideal, but they all had big drawbacks such as low image resolution and short battery life.

SJ1000 Action Camera
SJ1000 Action Camera

I later bought a SJ1000 which I have used to record bike rides until the Sony arrived and still use as a car trip recorder. I also had a Kodak ZX1 for a while, but that was quite disappointing. Given this is old stuff I´ll refrain from writing more about them, but you have the links, if interested, and you will still find them on sale.

Although a geek, I´ve been a rather “economic” one, never allowing myself to spend a lot of money on this “addiction” because of the other priorities of life (such as the kids´ University fund). The Sony HDR-AS30V was my first entry into a more sophisticated category of device.

Even though, at the time of purchase, the AS30V was not the entry level, it was also not the top Sony product in this category. Sony had already released the AS100V as their top of the range product. I did consider a GoPro, but their prices, even for the entry level version, were still a bit more than I was willing to pay at the time and, perhaps because of the way I am, I felt a bit annoyed with the “GoPRO Cult” many owners appear to belong to.

To start with, I do not recommend the Sony camera, even though there are many things I like about it. It may sound conflicting with what I wrote above, but for the price of this camera I´d recommend you actually spend a bit more and go for a GoPro or spend less and go for one of the Chinese made SJ series (with reservations given the lack of image stabilization).

Thumbs-Up IconThings I like about this camera:

    1. The picture and sound quality are truly exceptional. I did quite a lot of comparing with the likes of GoPROs, the Garmin Virb and some cheaper Chinese clones and I believe it’s in a pair with the GoPRO (perhaps better) and beats the VIRB hands-down when it comes to picture quality.
    2. The Image stabilization in video recording is great. It manages to eliminate most shaking even in very rough and uneven surfaces.
    3. Who said TV killed the Radio Star? It has a lot of radios built in… GPS, WiFi and NFC. WiFi for live video streaming to a smartphone and NFC for quick connection with the phone (which would be good if it worked well, but I don´t know if the problem is in the camera or in my phone, so giving it the benefit of the doubt).
    4. It has the ability to shoot stills at 11.9 MP (real pixel density, not interpolated), although the max resolution of time-lapsed pictures appears to be 1080p max.
    5. It has an external MIC connector
    6. It has several options of recording modes, even though I only ever used one.
    7. It comes with a 5m waterproof casing which is more than enough for my bike rides and surprisingly lets a reasonable amount of sound get through, not that this wold be a major advantage when is raining anyway.
    8. It can record while charging (although there appear to be some limitations, read below)
    9. Easy to use interface (buttons, menu layout, etc)
    10. Sufficient display for config and settings.
    11. Reasonable battery life for this type of device.
    12. It is not limited to 32GB MicroSD cards (with other limitations, see below)
    13. Built quality of the device is very good… the Sony brand is very reliable in this category.

thumbs-down-36-000000Things I don´t like:

    1. First and foremost, the provided PC software is awful. Yes, it has a few interesting features,butonmyDellXPS 15 with Windows 8.1 it crashes all the time. So let me write a few more bullet points about the things I don´t like in the software…
      • It wants to organize your life for you. I like to be in charge and do certain things manually. Goes away and starts scanning everything every time it loads (there might be those that may like this, I don´t)
      • It can only use GPS information for videos, not stills. It can produce videos with map overlays and other trip information such as speed, distance, etc. Example below:

        These are not very precise though. A positive here though (sorry to be mixed with the negatives) is that the software is also able to produce PiP videos where, for example, the Sony Camera records a forward facing video and another camera records a backwards facing video. You can then have the backwards video in a the corner of your forwarding facing one (never tested this though).
      • Even though the camera can take photos at time intervals, the software does not have the option to produce time-lapsed videos with them.
      • If the card is full, when connected to the PC it takes ages (really… something like 10 min) for the software to show the pictures in its interface. Something is not right here, as when I connect the camera, I can open the card as a storage device in windows and am able to see the pictures immediately.
      • The transfer of the files from the camera to the PC is not as fast as it could be.
      • When transferring the files to the PC, the folder creation process uses a dd-mm-yyyy format, which might be OK for most, but I would rather prefer yyyy-mm-dd for easiness of sorting and I could not find a place to configure this in the software. It appears to pick the folder format from the configured Windows taskbar date format. I changed the taskbar Clock format to show the day of the week and it started to produce folders with the day of the week as well.
      • Video editing is very limited and not very intuitive. Of course, Sony wants you to buy Sony Vegas, or Movie Studio or some other PRO video editing suite. Greedy bastards.
      • My Dell XPS 15 has a Ultra high 4K resolution display. The software can´t handle this screen size very well and absolutely doesn´t know how to handle screens with different DPI scales (not only a problem for this software though). For example, interface text gets so small it´s unreadble and if I am using the notebook screen I have to guess while typing a title as the interface is all messed up in that field.
    2. Things I don´t like in the camera itself…
      • Minimum interval for time-lapse pictures is 5 seconds. Too long in my opinion. Ideal would be if 1 and 3 seconds options existed also, which the hardware could check against the speed of the card inserted in the camera (I have a fast 64GB Samsung EVO card). It can also only shoot pictures at 1080p, which is sufficient for Full-HD time-lapse videos, but not enough to use as stills.
      • The camera does not give write access to the card when connected. This means you can´t delete files in the card, so you cannot free space deleting the pictures or videos you don´t like without taking the card out of the camera. You have to transfer all the files (even those you don´t want) and format the card to free space. I´ve heard the GoPro has the same limitation apparently (?).
      • NFC doesn´t work properly with my phone: I have a HTC One M8 phone with NFC and it rarely works for quick connection with the camera. Tried touching the phone to the NFC point in the camera in many spots and angles. Quicker to connect manually.
      • The WiFi connection is not stable. Disconnects often over time, even though I only use it to adjust the camera position. I have also purchased a DSC QX-10 camera that has the same (and perhaps even worse) problem.
      • The camera design: Its round on the bottom. It won´t stay upright without the waterproof casing. This is weakness that Sony has apparently recognized and fixed in later models.
    3. Even more things I don´t like about Sony…
      • Although they answer reasonably quickly, Sony´s support is awful. They don´t know their own products very well and contacting them is generally a waste of time, unless you have hardware issues under warranty.
      • Sony´s overall post-sales attitude: They sent me an email asking to provide feedback. I provided respectful feedback (such as this one) and they said my feedback wasn´t acceptable and invited me to re-write it. I didn´t, because I didn´t want to spend another 20 min writing the same things to get rejected again, but I wouldn´t have included it here as a negative if they were receptive to negative feedback. Organizations should not ask for feedback if all they want to hear from their customers is the stuff that helps them sell more. It´s just unfair to those that have given their time to them and perhaps made them aware of things they could improve upon.

Now, a few practical things I found out about this camera while using it that I did not see in Techmoan’s review or anywhere else.

  • Number of files apparently limited to 40,000: While I was riding my bike from Santiago de Compostela to Finisterre the camera beeped and I could see it had stopped taking time-lapsed pictures. I stopped the bike to look what was going on and the display was showing “Max”. I immediately related that to storage space and started to curse Sony, because the 64 GB MicroSD card only half full. So I replaced the card in the camera with a 32 GB card and everything started working again. Only later I realised the “Max” message was not related to the amount of storage being used in the card, but the number of files. Because I was taking time-lapsed pictures with 5 seconds intervals that meant that, by the end of the day, the camera had taken between 2,000 and 4,000 pictures, or in other words, JPG files. When the number of files in the camera reached 40,000 the camera stopped working. While this doesn´t comply with FAT16 (you can have more than 65K files in each folder, except the root) it´s the best explanation I can provide as recording video the camera does fill the 64GB storage space of the card, but obviously with less files. So, if you are planning long periods taking time-lapse pictures keep this in mind.
  • Sony Skeleton Frame for the HDR-ASxxx Cameras
    Sony Skeleton Frame for the HDR-ASxxx Cameras

    Little issues with bottom cap/lid: Another thing is the hinge that secures the bottom cap or lid in the camera tends to bent and break. Most of the time I use an accessory called “Skeleton Frame” (which was also included in Techmoan´s video review above). It´s a bit of an ugly and odd thing, but is the only mount that provides access to the bottom connectors, such as the USB and MIC. So while in the skeleton case the camera can continue to be charged while recording (for obvious reasons the waterproof case does not have any holes). With the constant opening and closing of the cap/lid to attach the USB charging cable the hinge on my camera is at the point of rupture now.

  • Foggy/misty lens: Now, this one I saw in Techmoan´s review to be honest, but also experienced it myself. In cold days condensation starts to build inside the waterproof camera case, because the camera, while recording, warms up and the exterior of the case is very cold. This tends to fog the lens from the inside. It seems Sony knew very well of this issue, but instead of “out-engineering” it so that it didn´t become an issue, they apparently saw the opportunity to sell little sachets of “anti-fog” materials that magically fit in a space right underneath the camera within the case. Greedy bastards, huh?
  • The camera can record while charging, but that depends on the charger´s power. If you plug the camera in a charger port that provides less the 1A of charging current the camera appears simply to ignore the charger and use battery power instead. Luckily the “PowerBar” (external battery) I use while riding has a 1.3A port and even a 2.1A port which provide more sufficient power for camera operation and charging.

Well, I think this is all I have to say about the Sony Action Camera

SJ M10 Action Camera
SJ M10 Action Camera

Few weeks before I left to Saint Jean Pied de Port for my pilgrimage, I bought also a SJ M10 based on the review I saw in Techmoan´s site. One of my latest videos, riding a recumbent bike, was filmed with this little camera. It doesn´t have WiFi or any of the fancy radios that the Sony does, but it does a brilliant job at its core which is recording videos. There is, however, no image stabilization on video recording which is a shame. You do get quite shaky videos with this camera if mounted on a handlebar, for example. Keep also in mind, this camera cannot handle MicroSD card sizes bigger than 32GB. It suffers from a few of the same issues I highlighted in the Sony such as the min interval for time-lapse photos is also 5 seconds, for example.

Despite these shortcomings, I really like this camera and it costs less than 1/2 of what I paid for the Sony (in promotional price), is very compact, comes with a lot of different cases and does a brilliant job in my opinion.

On the bright side it has a small 1.5″ display in the back to help frame the picture. If you are on a budget, but still want a good action cam that you can also use as a trip recorder in your car I totally recommend this one.

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