I’ve been a bit envious of those with a small action camera, and the fabulous videos they produce. I’m not creative enough to do what they do, but with this trip to the USA, I thought it would be nice to have a small camera that can take great pictures and video, that’s easy to fit on a small selfie stick or similar.
First I focused on a GoPro because I thought that was like the industry standard. I looked at a bunch of videos, read some articles, and compared GoPro Hero 8, 9, and 10. I was almost fixed on a 10 when I asked on Facebook if someone had one so I could play and test it for a bit.
A friend of mine then asked, does it have to be a GoPro? Well, no, I don’t have a preference per se. He had a Cosmo Action and was very satisfied. Looking at its successor, DJI Action 2 (name change apparently) it also looked promising.
So I started to look at the camera from DJI instead and was as impressed as I was with the GoPro. Looked for some comparisons and basically, it was two things that got to me;
- Form factor
- Horizontal stabilization
The DJI Action 2 is basically 4x4x2 cm. I can easily fit it in my pocket if needed. And when I saw a couple of comparisons of horizontal stabilization between a GoPro Hero 10 and DJI Action 2, the latter won pretty clearly. You can tilt the camera like 90 degrees and the result is like you never moved it at all. Pretty neat if you’re not that stable on your hand.
Another thing I liked with the DJI Action 2 is that you can attach it to a lanyard so you can wear it on a walk or a ride (probably not too extreme) and get a timelapse or a video of the whole trip.
Said and done. As usual, when I have decided on something, I want it right away. Found it on sale on Amazon so I bought it and got it after a couple of days. Now I’m trying out the different modes and also looking into how I’m going to post videos on this page. Lower resolution and some sort of CDN solution are probably needed.
So, instead of publishing the first video, exciting images from my walk during lunch, I had to settle with an image of the camera itself and an image taken by the camera on my cat, Rincewind. However, the image had to be compressed because of size limits. Probably gonna find a clever way for this to be semi-automated as well.
