In recent years, smartphones with ever-improved video capabilities have transformed the quality of personal video we can shoot, be it 4K or super-slow-motion video. What’s not improved is us as camera operators, and shaky, blurry video is still the norm. DJI, the company best known for aerial drones, have taken the image stabilisation tech from their drones and put it right in our hands and the result is the DJI Osmo. Can this pricey little handheld camera change the way you shoot video?

Straight out of the box, what you get with the Osmo is a 12.4MP/4K-video capable Zenmuse X3 camera mounted on a three-axis gimbal. This translates into a stabilisation system that can counteract motion and keep the camera firmly pointed exactly where you want it. The camera compensates incredibly quickly for any motion and unsteadiness; so quickly that you can walk around and film and turn around all of a sudden and it will remain level all the time. The result? Pro-level-steady 4K footage that is such a joy to watch. There’s an impressive 360-degree panorama mode too, which takes multiple shots and seamlessly splices them together far better than any phone camera could.

While shooting, you can use the trigger-style button to lock the camera on a subject — say if you want to keep a subject in the centre of your frame as you walk around it — or to switch the camera to selfie mode and record yourself. Your smartphone sits in the phone cradle and acts as the viewfinder, while videos and photos are stored on a microSD card inserted directly into the camera. Even with a typical smartphone attached, the ergonomics of the Osmo are great, and it’s light enough to be used one-handed for extended periods of time. That said, the 60-minute battery life is a tad short.

Now, since the Osmo looks quite unlike anything we’ve seen before, it’s bound to elicit confused stares from passers-by (is it a high-tech selfie stick?), but the silky smooth video is worth the brief embarrassment. At nearly 70 grand though, the Osmo isn’t particularly cheap. While on pure imaging performance, a simi-larly-priced DSLR will probably shoot better video and photos, but there’s really no comparison in terms of the image stabilisation that the Osmo offers. The Osmo is in a category of its own at the moment, and completely worth it if you want to give your inner Spielberg some serious wings!
♦ Rating: 8/10
♦ Price: Rs 69,990
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-DJIOsmo

The 4K factor

While the smartphone party moved onto 2K screens this past year, Sony was not one to toe the line and skipped right to 4K (2,160 x 3,840 pixel) displays with its Xperia Z5 Pre-mium. So, is 4K worth the premium you’re paying for the Premium?

Let me get straight to it — while the 5.5-inch display is capable of 4K resolution, all those pixels only come alive when you view images and videos in Sony’s pre-installed Albums and Movies apps. With the paucity of 4K content, your best bet is to record 4K video with the phone itself, or watch upscaled full-HD video within these apps.

All other times, the screen runs at full-HD resolution, which means that for the bulk of the time, you’re looking at a screen which is about the same as many other phones out there, and significantly less sharp if you looking at 2K displays on some flagships.

The rest of the phone is standard Sony flagship fare — clean (but not pathbreaking) design, a top-end Snapdragon 810 processor with 3GB memory and 32GB internal storage (expandable to 200GB). The 23MP rear camera turns out results that are right up there with the best, and watching multimedia with the front facing stereo speakers is great. Quite honestly though, there’s little to convince me to fork out the extra cash for the short-lived novelty of the 4K screen, and there are plenty of equally competent phones for much, much less.
♦ Rating: 7/10
♦ Price: Rs 62,990
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-Z5PremiumDual

Budget star

Asub-10K phone with 3GB of memory? I was waiting for the “…but the tradeoff is…” bit of the 10(Ten) smartphone by the Delhi-based Kult brand, but it never came. The phone seems sorted in more ways than one. The design, with its coarse plastic back, is comfortable to hold in one hand, and while the 5-inch, 720p display isn’t as sharp as the full-HD ones a couple of grand extra will get you, it handles colours really well and is bright enough for just about anyone’s taste.

Performance is about par for the course, though the 3GB of memory helps in multi-tasking and while gaming. The phone runs an almost vanilla Android 5.1 (Lollipop), which keeps things nice and snappy. The built-in 16GB of storage can be expanded to 128GB via microSD. The camera is rather average and battery life is just short of a full day’s worth of use, but all else considered, the Kult 10 is a good offering at this price point.
♦ Rating: 7/10
♦ Price: Rs 7,999
♦ URL: bit.ly/TT-Kult10

technocool@kanwar.net; follow me on twitter @2shar