Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In truth, the Osmo+ gets both 1-star rating AND a 5-star rating. It's a remarkable piece of technology. Considering the price, it's capabilities are jaw dropping. The problem is that it's marketed as a tool for the professional, semi-pro, and high-end hobbyist and it's just not reliable enough to meet that threshold. If you're contemplating purchasing the Osmo+ as a toy, to play around with ... a moderately attractive girl to date every once in a while when things are slow ... by all means go for it. It's fun. But know that the "nothing serious" arrangement is by mutual agreement. That girl isn't taking you seriously either. For the Pro (or semi-pro): If you're planning on making a buck with this thing, be very very cautious. It maybe does have a useful niche but it will also undoubtedly let you down in a multitude of ways, some predictable, some not. THE BAD: B1: DJI support and customer service is atrocious. Take your worst experience with AT&T, Sprint, your local Cable Co, any building trade contractor, multiply it by 10X, then throw in some arrogance/hubris, a pinch of a language/translation problem and a giant dollop of cultural incompatibility, then you'll have a small taste of what the "DJI Customer Experience" is like. Take a visit to the DJI website Forum and you can watch the company excoriated on a daily basis. That forum is a great resource for solving any problems that might come up because your only hope is other users who have walked through the fire before you. Platitudes, obfuscation, and avoidance seem to be the primary techniques in the DJI customer service repertoire. B2: Some units are dogs. I was lucky and got one without the host electromechanical things that can go wrong with the hardware. Many others were not so lucky. If you need to return your unit or get help solving a problem, good luck with that. See B1 above. Judging by stories on the DJI Forum you ship your camera off and wait and wait and wait and wait with no news for months on end. I had a defective UV filter and rather than just send a $5 replacement, DJI required that I send in the entire camera in for "evaluation" which could take up to 6 weeks. Which is just stupid. It was going to cost them more in shipping than it would to just mail a replacement filter. Needless to say, I just bought a new one on Amazon. B3: The DJI Go app that controls everything is buggy and poorly designed. When you're trying to pan quickly its very easy to send the app into a lock screen that takes several seconds to get out of, meanwhile whatever you were panning after has long since moved off screen. The focus control is a mess. The camera firmware is buggy. They seem to fix things in one version and then break them in the next release 6 mos later. There are complaints from over a year ago on the DJI forum about software bugs that still haven't been addressed. If your camera is working and you don't need the new firmware features, don't do the upgrade. See B1 above. B4: The marketing is absolute BS. They sell this as a 4k camera that can shoot up to 30mins of video. That is a blatant lie. It is true that after 30mins the camera stops recording and you have to press start to begin recording again. But if you want a continuous uninterrupted video file the max you'll get is about 8min+/- in 4K (14mins in 1080p30). There is a 4G file size limit so the camera needs to start writing a new file every time it hits that limit. Lots of cameras have this limitation but unlike every other camera on the planet that creates "chapters" or "spans" of their video files, the DJI Osmo loses several seconds of video in the transition between the two files. If you were planning on using this camera to shoot an event like a concert or presentation or a game or even your kid's school play know that you're going to lose footage. B5: The audio is terrible, unusable. Plan on a parallel recording device to capture clean sound if it's important. Noise from the fan and gimbal motors is somewhat to be expected but hits and pops are not. People even seem to have problems using recommended external mics. See the DJI forum for specific tales of woe. B6: Low light performance is terrible, über noisy. It's a 1/2" chip so I wasn't expecting much and it lived up to my expectations. In truth, footage shot in full sun looks ok if you dial in the correct manual camera settings and add an ND filter. THE GOOD G1: a 4K camera-gimbal combination that weighs about 14ozs for under $700. Nothing touches it, not even close. That's why you've read this far into this review. You can shoot all day with this thing and not get tired. If you get a unit that functions properly and master the ninja-walk you can get some impressive results. G2: Quality build. Except for the replaceable UV filter in front of the lens, the mechanical aspects of this unit are all solid. The phone mount is a he-man-engineering work of art. G3: The touch screen app for Pan Tilt Zoom control is amazing once you get the hang of it. You can do butter smooth moves in any direction and feather the start/stop maybe even better than with bigger Pro camera on a high-end tripod head. I've used several different professional PTZ controllers from Sony, Panasonic, et al over the years but none is as intuitive and easy to master as the DJI Go touchscreen interface. I love it. One note on the zooming, there is only one speed setting ... "glacial". You won't be doing any snap zooms with this thing. No idea if that's hardware limitation or they've just not bothered to create the software option. DJI won't answer the question. See B1 above. I guess I hate the Osmo+ because it has the potential to be great and DJI is just not trying hard enough to make it live up to that potential. It's that NBA player with all the physical ability in the world and none of the desire to do the work it takes to be great. If I haven't talked you out of buying this thing at least you'll go into your relationship with the Osmo+ with open eyes. This is all info I wish I'd had before pulling the trigger.