- DJI Osmo Action 5 - August 3, 2025
- The Arctic Circle - July 30, 2025
- Stealing Speed - July 26, 2025
Despite knowing it is always much better to simply stop the bike and properly compose a photo you can’t always do that, especially on busy highways where there might be zero place to safely stop so I have long had a little hobby of seeking out cameras to shoot photos while riding.
Action cams have been great for video but not for photos. Their still images were always low quality video frame grabs and their method of operation was not photo friendly. After turning on the cams defaulted to video, then you had to try switch to photo mode one handed while still riding, then press the shutter to take shot. Difficult and even when I got it right I’d usually already be past what I wanted to photo.
But this did not deter me, I simply looked for alternatives and have tried many devices over the course of the last 15 years.
I’ve had three action cams, three ‘lens only’ cameras of which I still have the Casio FR100 and I am on my third Ricoh Theta 360 cam. Posts about all these devices can be read elsewhere on the blog.
I had no intention to buy another action cam as my experience with GoPro’s was very poor and the video bias controls these cams had made me consider them unsuitable. However I became aware of DJI cams from fellow moto bloggers at The View from Above and The Road to Nowhere on their Flinders Ranges moto tour (check that ride out on those blogs) and curiosity pipped took a closer look and saw the control method of the DJI devices was unlike other cams I had tried.
So a couple weeks out from my Norway ride I grabbed a DJI Osmo Action 5 from Amazon and departed without any opportunity to test it on a bike.
I am using the DJI helmet mount which is a spring loaded clip on device. To this the Action 5 clips on with a magnetic and latch mount that is super secure yet can be removed instantly and placed on to the DJI magnetic mount tripod which I also picked up with the intention to take more photos of myself at locations using remote shutter trigger like I did with cameras in Japan – but it was so hot when stopped in Norway I never got around to it.
You can hear all about specs and marketing fluff from the ‘content creators’ on YouTube.
What mattered to me is can the device actually capture a decent still image, can it do it while riding with varying degrees of harsh road glare and vibrations. Does it have sufficient megapixels for me to crop the image and lastly but most important of all the ease of operating it one handed while riding.
Thanks to the above moto bloggers I already had seen some real life photos from the Action 4 which were quite reasonable quality. Significantly better than mushy stills I had seen people post from recent model GoPro’s. But then the Action 5 has a newer sensor again with a high resolution of 40MP so that plus decent dynamic range I saw on the 4 ticks off two of the features I wanted.
Then the ease of using the Osmo Action cam as a rider can’t be overstated. I can select photo mode and the device then stays in that mode. To take a photo while riding I simply press the shutter, the cam awakes snaps off a shot (or multi shot option) then gives 3 beeps (audible while wearing earplugs) then returns to standby.
It literally is one press and does everything for me. It consumes hardly any power in standby, I’ve been taking 50+ photos a day and still heaps of battery left after 3 days.
On my Norway ride I was still learning how to frame scenes with the cam (while riding) and really only started to get it right later on when I tilted my head up a little as the mount on my Nolan N70-2X had the cam slightly tilting forward. I also had the cam in 16:9 mode which I did not pick up till later. This is a crop of the sensor resolution but it also reduces the frame height so some of my photos were chopping off mountain tops in that mode. Going forward I should see further improvements using the cam in 4:3 mode but already I am quite pleased with what it has been able to deliver.
By default I am getting a jpeg and a raw file. There is more recovery available in the raw files but I have been using the jpegs as they have lens correction applied in camera and other computational processing done which allowed me to edit my Norway photos more simply on my small laptop while travelling.
If I waited till back home on my calibrated 4K monitor and took the time with more advanced software the quality could be improved from the raw files. I’m not sure it is needed for this blog. The jpegs already look decent to me and most visitors here are merely viewing thumbnails via a phone – but it is nice to know there is more that can be unlocked in future should I choose.
The DJI firmware also impresses me. Not just the general operation but the menus are well thought out and easy to use via the rear touch screen and the file transfer to my computer works superbly. This is where my Ricoh Theta is weak, the hardware is excellent but the software is almost an after thought and all the Japanese camera manufactures think like this.
As for video well I will wager that this will be the only post about the Osmo Action 5 not to mention anything about the video performance which I have not tried. Sorry if you arrived to this blog new and were waiting for that. I used to shoot video in the 90’s but have no interest in it now. This blog is my travel diary. It needs only to record my rides in a way I enjoy looking back at as I get older. But that said these cams are always better at video than they are at stills so it would have no problems doing video for you.
Overall then I will sum up by saying I have not purchased a camera that has impressed me as much as this for a long time and that was totally unexpected so I am delighted with the Osmo Action 5 and look forward to getting better with it and also trying out the mini tripod in future.
