Not too long ago, I had my hands on the DJI Osmo Pocket 4, and I’ve taken to calling it a solo creator’s very own production crew. Rumors about a two-lensed Osmo Pocket had circulated for months. I’m not one to revel in hot goss, so I waited. And waited.

And while waiting, turning 30 crept up on me. The DJI Osmo Pocket 4P arrived like a small, well-machined reminder of a life I didn’t end up living.

If I’d pursued filmmaking the way I once wanted to, this is the camera I would’ve dreamed up for myself. After all, the Osmo Pocket 4P is a creative director’s fantasy, built at the scale of a passport.

The unit landed on my desk just days before launch, with barely enough runway to put it through its paces properly.

Luckily, it arrived right as July began, which happens to be the month I always disappear on a long vacation. It’s my birth month, and I treat it accordingly. There’s no better way to test a device built for cinematic shooting than to hand it a full month of actual life.

The filmmaker I almost was

I always dreamed of directing sweeping cinematic films. As a broke teenager with big ambitions, I strategically pivoted into advertising instead.

I convinced myself it was a clever way to stay close to film sets while guaranteeing a steady paycheck. That creative pull never really vanished. It resurfaced in my early twenties during an extended phase of chasing beaches and climbing mountains.

I spent those trips half-watching travel vloggers and wondering why they were living my dream life instead of me. The Osmo Pocket 4P dug up an ambition I thought I had buried under sensible career choices.

I once wanted to be a National Geographic Explorer, mapping gorgeous terrain for a living. Instead, I became a competitive trail runner who works as a creative director, which brings its own chaotic terrain.

Life did not give me the exact script I wrote as a teenager, but this camera gave me a way to direct my story anyway on my own terms.

Earning its keep

To celebrate my birth month properly, I took the camera to Cagayan de Oro City, sprinted across the wild landscapes of Bukidnon, and boarded a flight to London for a dose of summer style and city architecture.

Both trips are honest reflections of who I am: a person pulled toward nature, and a person who will always, at heart, be a city boy. London doubled as work, too. I was there to cover Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked.

Across both continents, the dual lenses earned their keep. I captured crisp architectural details from miles away using the 240mm 12x zoom.

 

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However, I spent most of my time using the 60mm 3x medium telephoto lens. It delivered a natural background blur that made mundane street moments look like movie stills.

In Cagayan de Oro, I checked into a Marrakesh-inspired boutique hotel filled with intricate design details. I relied mostly on the 20mm 1x and 60mm 3x range for the entire stay.

Knowing I had 6x and 12x zoom in reserve gave me a sense of security, like carrying a luxury safety net in my handbag.

A sensor built for the way light actually behaves

The new 1-inch CMOS sensor is what changes the equation for cinematic travel footage. Light does most of the emotional work in a shot, and this is the first Pocket that seems to understand that instinctively.

With the new sensor, I didn’t have to fight to keep a face lit while the background held its own exposure. It also preserved highlight and shadow detail cleanly, even in scenes with harsh contrast, the kind that used to flatten out or blow up on older pocket cameras.

 

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That said, auto exposure wasn’t flawless. On a handful of occasions, it leaned toward overcorrecting and blowing everything out a touch too bright. Switching to manual, or Pro Mode, put me back in control and kept the shots true to what I was actually seeing.

 

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What I appreciated most was shooting solo for a Samsung campaign and having nearly every take be usable footage for my editor. Fewer discarded clips means less footage lost to the compromises of shooting alone.

 

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That’s mostly thanks to ActiveTrack, which now extends to the Med-Tele lens. Shooting portraits at 3x zoom, it delivers precise face recognition and tracking, holding exposure steady and skin tones consistent even while the subject is moving.

Shooting solo is genuinely difficult. With ActiveTrack, especially in portrait framing, it made the footage look more considered than the reality behind it… which was one person, alone, trying to land a single good shot without a crew to call it.

 

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Built-in polish, without the retouching pass

This is the section that matters most if you’re the kind of traveler who shoots, stars in, and edits your own content, because you don’t have the luxury of a color grade session or a retouch pass before something goes up. The Osmo Pocket 4P seems to understand that, and builds the polish in at the point of capture instead of leaving it for later.

Glamour and Film Tones work as an in-camera pass on skin, handling softening, brightening, and color temperature so a face still reads clean and true even lit by a random hotel lamp or the wrong side of a sunset.

Paired with that are stylized film filters that lean into an instant Fuji aesthetic. They give that warm, slightly desaturated look that used to take a preset and a few minutes in an app. Here, it’s baked into the file before you’ve even opened your phone.

That instant polish is the difference between going to sleep after a long day of travel and staying up until midnight editing clips. I’d land at a hotel after a full day, pull the footage straight off the camera, and post it with barely any correction. There was nothing to hide, and nothing left to fix.

Fill Light does the same job on the physical side of things. It adds soft, flattering light in night and backlit scenes. It balances uneven indoor lighting that usually ruins a vlog, and gives selfies and portraits a lift without a ring light or a second person holding one.

More importantly, shooting alone at night in an unfamiliar city is usually where a solo creator’s footage falls apart. Here, it held up.

Between the two, the camera is doing a version of the job a beauty producer and a gaffer would normally split between them, in real time, for a crew of one.

Room to actually direct

Beyond the automated conveniences, the Osmo Pocket 4P gives you real creative range if you want to reach for it.

D-Log and the newer D-Log 2 color profiles hold onto far more dynamic range than a standard picture profile, which matters if you’re planning to grade footage later rather than post it straight off the card.

Slow motion goes up to 4K at 240fps, which is enough headroom to pull dramatic, controlled slow-motion out of moments that happen far too fast to shoot deliberately.

Slow-shutter video is the underrated feature here, but it’s the one that can give you the most cinematic frames: light trails pulling through a night street, clouds smearing gently over a skyline. They’re mostly shots that usually needs a tripod and a plan, but done handheld and on instinct.

Made to disappear into a trip

None of this matters if the camera can’t survive the actual mechanics of travel. This is where the Osmo Pocket 4P does the most work. At 230 grams, it’s compact and portable enough to live in a jacket pocket.

The physical joystick and quick shortcuts save the day when you are shooting one-handed on the go.

The 4K Live Photo feature captures a short burst of motion around a photo, which turned out to be the most authentic way to remember my race finishes. Meanwhile, the 37-megapixel stills were crisp enough to capture fine architectural textures across London.

Storage rounds it out sensibly: 103GB built in, with transfer speeds up to 800MB/s. Between a race in Bukidnon and a flight to London, the last thing I wanted to manage was a memory card. This let me not think about it at all.

Is the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P your GadgetMatch?

I didn’t become the National Geographic Explorer I once imagined for myself. I became something adjacent to it instead, a trail runner with a day job in creative direction, chasing landscapes on weekends and screens on weekdays.

The DJI Osmo Pocket 4P didn’t hand me back the life I once mapped out as a teenager. It just made the life I actually have look, for a month at least, exactly as cinematic as I’d always wanted it to be.

Swipe right if you’re the kind of traveler who shoots alone and needs a camera doing the work of a small crew, handling color, light, and tracking without anyone else in the room.

It rewards creators who jump between wide landscapes and close portraits with zero lens changes. And if you’ve ever landed somewhere with a dying memory card and no laptop in sight, the built-in storage and fast transfer solve a problem you’ll actually recognize.

Swipe left if your bag already has a mirrorless body and a gimbal in it, since the Pocket 4P will mostly repeat what you’re already carrying.

It’s also not the camera for someone who shoots static, tripod-locked setups and wants manual control as the default. And if the price sits well above what you’d normally spend on a pocket camera, it’s worth being honest with yourself about how often you’d actually reach for this over your phone.

For a solo creator who travels for both work and the version of themselves that only comes out on a trail or in a new city, the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P earns its spot in the bag. It’s not trying to replace a full production; it’s trying to be one. And for that, it deserves the GadgetMatch Seal of Approval.