- Remote control and a CPL filter for DJI Osmo Action 5 - March 7, 2026
- New Zealand Te Waipounamu - February 27, 2026
- The Fast Stuff - February 15, 2026
DJI Bluetooth remote
The DJI Osmo Action 5 has impressed me with how many of the images it captures are of a reasonable quality for an action cam however it completely misses sometimes when I try take a photo.
The issue is the shutter button on the top of the cam is very stiff – or in other words it has a lot of resistance when trying to press it. When held in your hands it is not difficult however when trying to press the shutter wearing gloves with the camera mounted to my helmet I often think I have pressed it but in fact did not manage to depress the button. I can’t overstate how hard to depress the shutter button is, I often worry I will break the camera from it’s mount while trying to depress the shutter.
The button is rubberised and feels vague when wearing gloves and adding to the difficulty is the button sits on the wrong side of the cam for us riders to use with our left hand. I find it easier to operate with my right hand as I can then get my thumb under the cam to help apply pressure. But this is of course my throttle hand and unless I have the cruise control engaged I’ve rarely done this.
DJI make a Bluetooth remote so I decided to try it.
It has a small screen that tells you info like trying to connect, connected, battery level and even what mode your connected cam is set to.
To use the remote when riding you first turn the remote on and the Osmo Action on. The remote automatically looks for the cam and very quickly is connected. You can then turn the cam back off, it will go into a sleep mode and remain connected to the remote control.
When the remote control shutter is pressed it wakes the cam which will take photo or video as per what mode you have pre set it. In my case I have it take 6 photos. Then it goes back to sleep. Sounds good except the remote control shutter button is also hard to press with gloves.
Without gloves it is not difficult but with gloves there is a raised ridge around the left half of the button and this makes it harder to depress wearing gloves. On my tour in New Zealand I actually gave up trying to activate the cam via the remote and went back to using the cam’s own shutter button.
So as it is from the box I did not find the remote useful for a moto rider.
However I have purchased some stick on raised shutter buttons. Apparently the glue is very strong so I think with the button raised then it should be easier to use with gloves. I’m also sticking one to the shutter of the Osmo Action to see if it helps that as well. I will post a follow up after my next tour in April.
CPL filter for DJI Osmo Action
Small sensors lack dynamic range and blow out highlights unless they image stack like modern smartphones do.
The DJI Osmo Action 5 doesn’t image stack and blows out skies pretty regularly.
I’ve seen guys using ND filters on action cams and that works well for video but I only use my Osmo Action 5 to take still photos. I guess that sounds weird now everybody is a YouTuber but I’m not a fan of on bike/helmet videos. Action cam fisheye lenses flatten landscapes and ‘the road ahead’ looks similar almost everywhere so all those ride videos tend to look the same to me. But I digress, anyway a ND filter on these cams in photo mode introduces more motion blur.
The CPL filter doesn’t have a rotating bezel like ones used on camera’s and I wondered how can this possibly work? But then all my sunglasses are polarised and they work without needing to be rotated so I thought the manufacturers must have done something similar.
Ha-ha well no they didn’t. They made a push on CPL filter that doesn’t rotate and only works when you are at the right angle to the sun. What that gave me was many terrible photos with banding of over exposed or blacked out because the filter was at incorrect position.
I cannot recommend buying a CPL filter for your Osmo Action however it did give me this wacky/fuzzy photo while I was testing it in New Zealand.
Ya, they are convenient but do lack in image quality. That’s why I still use my big/heavy Nikon D850. 🙂
I realize that it is hard to pack for a long trip though… especially when you add a few lenses.
Hi Mark,
D850 has a great sensor.
But yes the size of the gear is an issue for me moto touring.
Off the bike the latest phones with their image stacking computational processing deliver images good enough quality for a blog like this where maximum size I can post is 2560 and very few people actually click to view the photos that size rather just scroll down the page looking at the 1024 low resolution images (or 50% of visitors are merely looking at thumbnails on a phone).
However using a phone I note that I am not focused on my composition and light as I would be with a camera because I tend to shoot everything with the phone in vertical hold panorama sweep mode that generates high resolution images and then composition is always done in post processing.
I am currently shopping for another camera to get back to composition focused shooting, so watch this space 🙂