There’s a €380 camera in my pocket right now that overheated on day two, locked its own screen, and refused to turn off on a fotowalk through Da Nang. I bought it with my own money, I already found its breaking point, and I’m still going to tell you it might be the most important camera I own. Not the best. The most important. There’s a difference, and it took me two DJI Pockets and one enormous gimbal to learn it.
The short version
- DJI Pocket 4, ~€380 in Vietnam — in the US it only surfaces as a bundle on Amazon (camera + 128GB card + selfie stick + case). Single wide-angle lens; the 4P adds a second lens for roughly a pro-line price.
- 10-bit color and a proper bitrate — the footage grades like real footage and cuts in next to my Sony A7CR.
- Tracking is the standout feature — it held a subject at twenty meters without letting go.
- It overheated on day two in tropical heat. Real thing, plan around it.
- We compared it against the 4P, the Insta360 Luna Ultra and the iPhone 17 in the podcast below — table further down.
The gimbal that almost ended it
Years ago, before any of this was a job, I did what every beginner does: I researched my way into the biggest possible solution. A full-size DJI gimbal, the kind you see on film sets, paired with my Sony A7 body. Professional stabilized video. That was the plan.
The plan lasted about as long as the calibration did. Which is to say: not long, and never twice in a row.
The rig was heavy. Balancing it was a small engineering project I had to repeat every time I changed a lens. Getting it out of the bag was a decision, and most days the decision was no. I had invested serious money in being able to film professionally, and the actual result was that I stopped filming.
So I did something that felt like giving up at the time: for roughly the same money, I bought the original DJI Pocket. A camera the size of a candy bar with a motorized gimbal on top. That little thing is the reason I make videos today. We took it to the Cham Islands and Bach Ma National Park, I shot behind-the-scenes with it, and at some point I even filmed a paid tennis promo on it. It only had 2x zoom and no real depth of field, but it shot clean 4K and it was always there. The best camera spec nobody prints on the box.
DJI Pocket 4 review: what’s actually new
Around July 15th, I walked out of DSLR Da Nang with the DJI Pocket 4. If you’re in central Vietnam, that’s the store I’d point you to (here on Google Maps) — excellent service, English-speaking staff, and they know their gear. About €380 here — pocket cameras are noticeably cheaper in Asia than in Europe. When I bought mine, you couldn’t officially get this camera in the US at all; since then it has surfaced on Amazon as a bundle with a 128GB card, selfie stick and case — which, if you’re starting from zero, is roughly the kit I ended up assembling piece by piece anyway.
Coming from the Pocket 1, the jump is bigger than I expected:
- 10-bit color with a proper bitrate — the difference between “phone footage we’ll fix in post” and footage that blends into a timeline next to my Sony A7CR without embarrassing itself.
- Webcam and podcast mode — we recorded the entire podcast below on it, active tracking running the whole time.
- Vertical shooting for reels without rotating anything, plus 4K timelapses.
- 3x zoom (the Pocket 1 had 2x), a genuinely usable screen, a smoother gimbal.
- DJI Mic integration — existing DJI mics pair straight to it. If you’re already in the ecosystem, that’s a real switching cost working in DJI’s favor.
And the honest list, because there is one:
- It overheated on day two. Fotowalk through Da Nang, possibly my fault — it may have been sitting in the motorbike where heat builds up — and it hit the strangest failure mode I’ve seen: the screen went dark and the camera refused to turn off. A camera you can’t turn off is a very specific kind of stress. It recovered, but in a tropical climate this is real. If you’ve hit this too, tell me — I want to know if I got unlucky or if this is just life at 35 degrees.
- The custom buttons are half-finished. Two new buttons with single, double and triple tap — but you can’t assign the functions you actually want. Triple tap offers exactly two options. The joystick doubles as a zoom you didn’t ask for. It needs a firmware pass.
- The z-axis bob is still there. Walk with any Pocket and the footage breathes up and down. The 4 handles it better than any previous generation, but it hasn’t disappeared.
DJI Pocket 4 vs 4P: why my podcast guest went the other way
The same week I bought the 4, my friend Sebastian — a filmmaker who’s been working with gimbals for ten years, find his work at byndnow.com — bought the 4P. So we sat down and recorded the first episode of The Solo Creator about exactly this decision. First take, we got thirty seconds in before realizing we’d forgotten to switch cameras. That take stayed in.
Sebastian came from the Pocket 3, and his frustration was B-roll: film everything on one wide-angle and it gets boring fast. He’d been cutting in iPhone tele footage to get variety, and hated the workflow — two different systems, two different color sciences, and your phone stops being a phone the moment it becomes your B-camera. The 4P’s second lens solves exactly that, so he paid the pro-line premium.
He also found a downside that, at the time of recording, we hadn’t seen in a single online review: the 4P’s two lenses sit on different sensors, and they shift color relative to each other. You can’t run the same color profile on both — you find a workaround or you live with it. If you’re buying the 4P for intercutting between its own lenses, know that going in.
DJI Pocket 4 vs Insta360 Luna Ultra vs iPhone: the comparison
We both did the research rounds before buying, and both landed on DJI over the Insta360 Luna Ultra — for reasons that have less to do with spec sheets than with track record. The short of the podcast, in one table:
| DJI Pocket 4 | DJI Pocket 4P | Insta360 Luna Ultra | iPhone 17 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lenses | Single wide-angle, 3x zoom | Dual lens (second lens for B-roll variety) | Dual lens, detachable screen doubles as a mic | Multiple, 13-200mm equivalent |
| Generation | 4th generation gimbal camera | 4th generation, new pro line | First gimbal camera Insta360 has ever made | Mature, but it’s a phone |
| 10-bit / log | Yes, mature profiles | Yes, but color shifts between the two lenses (different sensors) | First-gen log — footage goes mushy in log per the reviews we found; may improve via firmware | Yes, but the HDR-processed look is hard to shake |
| Microphones | Pairs with existing DJI Mics | Pairs with existing DJI Mics | New ecosystem — your DJI mics don’t come with you | Whatever you bolt on |
| Headline spec | Tracking that held a subject at 20 meters | Second lens | 8K30 — a marketing number; nobody delivers in 8K, and GoPro still ships 12MP sensors because pixel size beats pixel count | Handles harsh mixed light better than any of them |
| The honest catch | Overheated on me on day two | Lens-to-lens color shift | First-gen product risk | Battery drain, footage chaos, and you can’t open Google Maps while filming |
The phone deserves one more sentence, because every pocket-camera review ends up there. The iPhone comes close on paper — but as Sebastian put it, you want to use your phone as a phone. The moment it’s your A-camera, every notification is a production problem, the battery becomes a countdown, and the software look — that flat, evenly-lit HDR sheen — tells everyone what it was shot on. The Pocket’s bigger sensor and 10-bit files just start further ahead in the grade.
What actually matters: light, not gear
The most useful five minutes of the podcast had nothing to do with cameras. Sebastian’s rules for small sensors, which cost nothing:
- Never shoot backlit on a small sensor. Your shadows fill with grain and your face gets buried in ISO noise.
- Light your face, always. We set up the podcast facing the window for exactly this reason — clean light on us, background falling away dark.
- Learn light before you buy anything. Phone, Pocket or cinema camera — the audience on social media stopped caring what it was shot on. They notice light and they notice ideas.
And the use case that sells these cameras better than any spec: you can hang one out of the slow train in Da Lat, or film yourself walking through a market with the tracking locked on, and if the worst happens you’ve lost €500, not €5,000. Sebastian has destroyed enough cameras over the years to price that in. Be safe, obviously. But that math changes what you’re willing to point a camera at.
The pattern under all of it
Every few years I have to relearn the same thing: the gear that gets used beats the gear that impresses. The big gimbal was objectively more capable than the first Pocket, and it produced almost nothing. The Pocket produced years of footage and eventually a career direction — not because it was better, but because it removed every excuse between me and recording. Sebastian said it on the podcast: it’s a good camera, not yet a professional camera. That’s fine. It’s not applying for that job.
Gear in this post
The short list, for whoever’s building their own pocket setup.
- DJI Osmo Pocket 4 (bundle with 128GB card, selfie stick and case) — the camera this whole post is about. I bought mine in Vietnam for around €380; in the US it’s this Amazon bundle, and the selfie stick is what turns it into the dolly-shot machine from the podcast.
- DJI Mic Mini — pairs straight to the Pocket 4, no receiver needed. The ecosystem argument from the table, in practice.
- Sony A7CR — my main camera, and the footage the Pocket 4 has to blend with. Full review here.
- Dehancer — the film-emulation plugin I grade almost everything with, including the travel film above (Color Space Transform to Rec.709 first, then Dehancer on an adjustment layer). Code JIMGROOTES gets you 10% off. Full review here.
More of this on the UNFILTERED channel, and more of Sebastian at byndnow.com and @sebazpictures. The Solo Creator will be back once we’ve put more hours on both cameras — neither of us wanted to ship a verdict after two days.
The Pocket 1 still works, by the way. It’s in the drawer next to my desk, next to a gimbal balancing plate I haven’t touched in years. One of them earned its retirement.
Affiliate disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The Dehancer link above is also an affiliate link — using it costs you nothing extra, sends a small kickback my way, and funds the next video.
