桃園鏡頭收購g part of a standard desktop keyboard.
Jim Salter
From the left: 40-pin GPIO header, microSD card slot, two micro-HDMI output ports, a USB-C power port, two USB 3.0 type-A ports and one USB 2.0 type-A port, Gigabit Ethernet port, Kensington lock slot.
Jim Salter
From the left: 40-pin GPIO header, microSD card slot, two micro-HDMI output ports, a USB-C power port, two USB 3.0 type-A ports and one USB 2.0 type-A port, Gigabit Ethernet port, Kensington lock slot.
Jim Salter
The visible hump on the underside of the Pi4 provides a comfortable typing angle and clearance for the passive-cooling vents.
Jim Salter
The visible hump on the underside of the Pi4 provides a comfortable typing angle and clearance for the passive-cooling vents.
Jim Salter
From the left: 40-pin GPIO header, microSD card slot, two micro-HDMI output ports, a USB-C power port, two USB 3.0 type-A ports and one USB 2.0 type-A port, Gigabit Ethernet port, Kensington lock slot.
Jim Salter
The visible hump on the underside of the Pi4 provides a comfortable typing angle and clearance for the passive-cooling vents.
Jim Salter
Unboxed and plugged in, the Pi 400 is functional but not particularly lovely. On the plus side, the integrated keyboard means fewer cables to deal with. Unfortunately, the remaining cables are unusually likely to snarl and look a bit feral. They are both stiffer and shorter than I’d prefer in an ideal world, making it difficult to impossible to end up with a setup that doesn’t look like a rat’s nest. The red cable for the mouse clashes pretty violently with the off-white cables for USB-C power and micro-HDMI out, which doesn’t help any.
That said, it’s important to remember that the entire kit retails for $100. Within the limits of the Pi 400’s very generous price, it’s not really fair to complain too hard about a few aesthetic gaffes here and there! Consumers with a few extra dollars to spend might want to consider replacing the Pi 400’s mouse with something a bit more functional, though… and a full-sized keyboard might not be a bad idea while you’re at it.
The integrated keyboard is functional but noticeably narrower than a standard keyboard. I’m not generally sensitive to variations in keyboard layout due to a long career involving Other People’s Computers in large numbers, but I was plagued with constant mistyping problems the entire time I tested the Pi 400.
It’s also worth noting that, while the Pi 400 supports dual displays, it does so with micro-HDMI ports, not full-sized ones—and it ships with a single cable. You’ll need an extra cable if you want to use your Pi 400 with dual displays—and since it ships with a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, not an adapter, things will get complicated if you want to use it with, e.g., portable LED displays that have off-sized ports themselves.
Finally, there’s no 3.5mm audio jack on the Pi—if you’ve got it hooked to a television or a monitor with speakers, it can deliver audio over HDMI; otherwise you’ll need a supported USB audio device. I tested with an inexpensive USB gaming headset, which worked fine.
Impressions—Raspberry Pi OS
Raspberry Pi OS suspects you might be using it on a television, not a proper monitor—so it starts out with significant overscan boundaries by default.
Jim Salter
Raspberry Pi OS suspects you might be using it on a television, not a proper monitor—so it starts out with significant overscan boundaries by default.
Jim Salter
The overscan goes away after a reboot, if you tell the setup dialog, “Yes, I see big black borders.”
Jim Salter
The overscan goes away after a reboot, if you tell the setup dialog, “Yes, I see big black borders.”
Jim Salter
Raspberry Pi OS suspects you might be using it on a television, not a proper monitor—so it starts out with significant overscan boundaries by default.
Jim Salter
The overscan goes away after a reboot, if you tell the setup dialog, “Yes, I see big black borders.”
Jim Salter
We tried playing a 4K 60fps YouTube video on the Pi 400. Even at 1080p, not 4k, it dropped a lot of frames.
Jim Salter
We tried playing a 4K 60fps YouTube video on the Pi 400. Even at 1080p, not 4k, it dropped a lot of frames.
Jim Salter
Checking CPU utilization, we see that the system’s pretty much pegged while trying to play this 60fps video, even at 720p.
Jim Salter
Checking CPU utilization, we see that the system’s pretty much pegged while trying to play this 60fps video, even at 720p.
Jim Salter
We tried playing a 4K 60fps YouTube video on the Pi 400. Even at 1080p, not 4k, it dropped a lot of frames.
Jim Salter
Checking CPU utilization, we see that the system’s pretty much pegged while trying to play this 60fps video, even at 720p.
Jim Salter
I began testing the Pi 400 using its native Raspberry Pi OS Linux distribution—which is basically Debian with LXDE and a lot of middleware optimizing it for the Pi. Unfortunately, there’s almost nothing in the way of standard benchmarking utilities that run on ARM Linux—all I could find was the Phoronix Test Suite, which would have required more time to run than I had to test the device in total. So for the most part, I’m going to talk about my subjective experience, rather than hard numbers.
The good news about the Pi 400 is that it does make a credible desktop PC, in the sense that, yes, you can totally use it without things breaking. With that said, you’re unlikely to forget that you’re using a very inexpensive ARM device. Much like the Pinebook Pro, the Pi 400 exhibits heavy latency while opening applications that’s perhaps possible to live with but impossible not to notice.
Also like the Pinebook Pro, once the applications are actually open, they generally run smoothly enough—although we did find the Pinebook Pro’s hex-core 2.0GHz big/1.5GHz little CPU noticeably punchier than the Pi 400’s straight 1.8GHz quad-core. The biggest problem I had was with high-resolution, high-frames-per-second YouTube videos.
I only tested the Pi 400 with a 1080p monitor, so I can’t speak to its chops with 4K videos—but it’s absolutely not capable of handling the Costa Rica in 4K 60fps HDR video without visible frame drop, even at 720p. The major issue here appears to be the 60fps rate, not the 720p resolution. I also tested the “Forests” episode of Netflix’s docu-series Our Planet on YouTube at 1080p, and that video played back flawlessly.
Examining CPU utilization during playback of the 60fps Costa Rica video, we can see the little 1.8GHz Broadcom quad-core CPU struggling—it’s at its limits, with CPU utilization for all cores at more than 90 percent. Although the BCM2711 supports hardware offload of video decoding—without which, this video would be playing in seconds per frame, rather than just dropping frames a bit—the hardware offload can only do so much, and the CPU is being asked to take on more than it can handle in software.
This effect is even more visible when entering or leaving full-screen playback. On a standard desktop PC, that operation takes perhaps 100-150ms. On the Pi 400, it frequently takes as much as three or four full seconds, during which the video itself tends to keep playing, but the surrounding controls and framework only partially render/stop rendering while the shift finishes taking place.
Getting audio out of the Pi 400 was a bit of a challenge; it defaulted to attempting to deliver audio over HDMI, and Raspberry Pi OS’ audio control dialog isn’t the best. Even after changing the output device to USB Audio (my gaming headset), YouTube wasn’t producing audio—and there’s no “test” button I could find in Pi OS, like the one in Ubuntu’s audio-control dialog. Closing and reopening the browser entirely after changing the output device resolved the issue, and audio played from the headset fine afterward.
All of these quibbles aside, I again have to make note of the sheer inexpensiveness of the Pi 400—it’s only $70 for the device itself or $100 for a kit that includes a mouse, SD card, micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, USB-C power supply, and 247-page full-color guide packed chock-full of tips and projects.
At $100 or less for a functional, reliable, well-packaged, and integrated desktop computing device, I’m not going to get mad about YouTube looking funny and hanging for a few seconds when it shifts back and forth from full-screen. Yes, Walmart’s $350 Gateway laptop is considerably more powerful, and it includes a screen, battery, and much better keyboard… but that $350 would buy five Raspberry Pi 400s.
Ubuntu 20.10 “Groovy Gorilla”
The Pi Foundation shipped us a ready-to-go Ubuntu 20.10 SD card, as well as the Raspberry Pi OS SD card already installed in the system.
Jim Salter
The Pi Foundation shipped us a ready-to-go Ubuntu 20.10 SD card, as well as the Raspberry Pi OS SD card already installed in the system.
Jim Salter
The 60fps Costa Rica video was hilariously unplayable under Ubuntu, but this 30fps YouTube video played back pretty well at 1080p.
Jim Salter
The 60fps Costa Rica video was hilariously unplayable under Ubuntu, but this 30fps YouTube video played back pretty well at 1080p.
Jim Salter
Although the YouTube video for Netflix’s Our Planet episode “Forests” didn’t appear to drop any frames when played back, there was minor screen tearing visible in some scenes.
Jim Salter
Although the YouTube video for Netflix’s Our Planet episode “Forests” didn’t appear to drop any frames when played back, there was minor screen tearing visible in some scenes.
Jim Salter
The 60fps Costa Rica video was hilariously unplayable under Ubuntu, but this 30fps YouTube video played back pretty well at 1080p.
Jim Salter
Although the YouTube video for Netflix’s Our Planet episode “Forests” didn’t appear to drop any frames when played back, there was minor screen tearing visible in some scenes.
Jim Salter
I also tested the Pi 400 under Ubuntu 20.10, which was preflashed on a second SD card that the Pi Foundation shipped specially to us along with the Pi 400 kit. The Ubuntu image is actually an installer itself, not a fully installed OS; on first boot, it walks the user through a few basic questions prior to running the actual installation process, which also goes to the SD card.
In general, Ubuntu 20.10 is exactly as Desktop Engineering Director Martin Wimpress promised me—a fully functional distribution ready-to-go with the Pi 400, without any quibbles about things that don’t work here or there. If you’re familiar with Ubuntu Desktop, you’ll be familiar with Ubuntu on the Pi 400—it just works, and it looks exactly the same as it would on a traditional x86 system.
With that said, it is significantly slower than Raspberry Pi OS, and for the moment, I wouldn’t particularly recommend it on the Pi 400 yet. It’s noticeably slower to boot, slower to open applications, and the 60fps YouTube video that dropped frames here and there under Raspberry Pi OS only renders a frame here or there under Ubuntu.
We suspect that most of the people who are habituated to Ubuntu’s Gnome3-based desktop will find it easier to adapt to Raspberry Pi OS’ functional LXDE-based desktop than to deal with the lower performance that Groovy Gorilla offers right now.
I suspect this will change in the future, as 桃園鏡頭收購canonical and the Pi Foundation continue working hand in hand to improve Ubuntu’s integration on the Pi—but Raspberry Pi OS, like Ubuntu, is for the most part just Debian under the hood. I think it’s probably better, for now, for Ubuntu users to adapt to using Pi OS rather than adapting to Ubuntu’s lower performance on the Pi.
Performance and reliability analysis
The Pi 400 doesn’t seem likely to share the Pi 4’s overheating problems—I never saw CPU temp higher than 52°C.
Jim Salter
The Pi 400 doesn’t seem likely to share the Pi 4’s overheating problems—I never saw CPU temp higher than 52°C.
Jim Salter
Although YouTube enjoys hardware video decoding offload on the Pi 400, there’s still a lot going on in software, as this Netdata graph while watching Our Planet—Forests in 1080p demonstrates.
Jim Salter
Although YouTube enjoys hardware video decoding offload on the Pi 400, there’s still a lot going on in software, as this Netdata graph while watching Our Planet—Forests in 1080p demonstrates.
Jim Salter
The Pi 400 doesn’t seem likely to share the Pi 4’s overheating problems—I never saw CPU temp higher than 52°C.
Jim Salter
Although YouTube enjoys hardware video decoding offload on the Pi 400, there’s still a lot going on in software, as this Netdata graph while watching Our Planet—Forests in 1080p demonstrates.
Jim Salter
It’s not hard to spot the time at which I shifted the Costa Rica video from 480p/30fps to 720p/60fps.
Jim Salter
It’s not hard to spot the time at which I shifted the Costa Rica video from 480p/30fps to 720p/60fps.
Jim Salter
Netdata itself consumes a significant amount of the Pi400’s CPU—especially while the real-time graphing interface is visible.
Jim Salter
Netdata itself consumes a significant amount of the Pi400’s CPU—especially while the real-time graphing interface is visible.
Jim Salter
It’s not hard to spot the time at which I shifted the Costa Rica video from 480p/30fps to 720p/60fps.
Jim Salter
Netdata itself consumes a significant amount of the Pi400’s CPU—especially while the real-time graphing interface is visible.
Jim Salter
The best news about the Pi 400’s performance and reliability is that the device doesn’t seem to share the Pi 4’s predilection for overheating. Despite having no active cooling, the Pi 400 never got within 30°C of its thermal limits in my testing—even during a 10-minute-long CPU stress test, using stress-ng. My office was at 28°C during testing; the Pi 400 idled at about 32°C and peaked at 52°C—and it’s rated for unthrottled operation up to 85°C.
Moving on from the thermals, I wanted to get a little more detail about what’s happening when the Pi 400 opens applications sluggishly and plays back video less than smoothly. A lot of readers got excited about Ubuntu’s new firmware, which allows USB booting, potentially overcoming SD card I/O limitations—so I particularly wanted to look for spikes in CPU iowait (time the processor spends waiting for data to come back from storage).
Although there is an occasional large spike in iowait (magenta areas on the graph)—like the one visible on CPU3 at about 16:52:40—they’re uncommon. For the most part, what I’m seeing here is just plain not enough CPU to get transient, high-demand tasks done as quickly as x86 users are accustomed to getting them done. Opening applications is hard work—significantly harder, in many cases, than actually running those applications—and the lack of grunt in the BCM2711 is readily apparent there.
We can also see that lack of CPU firepower readily in the Netdata graphs when shifting the Costa Rica video from 480p/30fps to 720p/60fps. At 480p/30fps, the CPU spends most of its time beneath 50-percent CPU utilization, with frequent but narrow spikes up to 80 percent or higher. But when we try to render 60fps video, the CPU spends almost all of its time at 80 percent or higher, on all four cores—making it effectively saturated, with the result of rendering video in seconds-per-frame rather than the other way around.
It certainly can’t hurt to replace the onboard SD card with a high-performance USB3 solid-state drive—but I don’t believe it will really solve the underlying issue that the Pi 400 is still a Pi, with a passively cooled CPU that just doesn’t stack up to actively cooled x86 CPUs in standard desktops and laptops.
Disassembly
There are no screws on the outside of the Pi 400’s chassis—so don’t bother prying up the rubber feet on the bottom. Insert a plastic spudger and gently pry clips loose all the way around the chassis.
Jim Salter
There are no screws on the outside of the Pi 400’s chassis—so don’t bother prying up the rubber feet on the bottom. Insert a plastic spudger and gently pry clips loose all the way around the chassis.
Jim Salter
With the chassis opened, the keyboard can be flipped over, revealing a heat spreader covering most of the Pi 400’s board.
Jim Salter
With the chassis opened, the keyboard can be flipped over, revealing a heat spreader covering most of the Pi 400’s board.
Jim Salter
The chassis didn’t have screws, but the heat spreader does. They look funky, but a Phillips-head driver fits them.
Jim Salter
The chassis didn’t have screws, but the heat spreader does. They look funky, but a Phillips-head driver fits them.
Jim Salter
With the chassis opened, the keyboard can be flipped over, revealing a heat spreader covering most of the Pi 400’s board.
Jim Salter
The chassis didn’t have screws, but the heat spreader does. They look funky, but a Phillips-head driver fits them.
Jim Salter
You’ll also need to disconnect the keyboard’s ribbon cable. Flip up the black plastic ledge, and the cable slides out—there is no pinned-out connector; the clip pins the cable’s conductors down to their mates.
Jim Salter
With the keyboard cable detached, we can gently pry up the heat spreader—but be careful; it’s attached to the CPU with double-sided thermal tape.
Jim Salter
It’s amazing how clean and simple a typical ARM board really is. The BCM2711 CPU is centered on the board, under and slightly right of the HDMI logo.
Jim Salter
There’s not a whole lot of reason to crack open the Pi 400, apart from sheer curiosity—what little is on the board at all is soldered down, and with the entire device only costing $70, we’re not sure there will ever be much market for replacing the motherboard in an existing chassis.
If you decide to break open a Pi 400 anyway, you’ll need a spudger—the chassis isn’t held together with any screws at all, so don’t bother peeling the feet off the underside. Instead, take a fine-edged spudger and gently work it into the seam—eventually, you’ll expose one of many little rectangular cutouts that allow further prying. At each one, gently work the spudger a little bit deeper, then just continue to slide it across the device inside the seam.
The clips on the chassis are tight, so we really do not recommend substituting a knife blade for a proper spudger here—if you do, you’ll at the very least leave obvious chewed-up marks on the case, a
全景相機主要是通過前後兩顆鏡頭，在錄影或拍照的時候，一次捕捉周圍 360 度的畫面，得以讓視野無限開拓，更延伸出多元的攝影玩法。（圖／記者黃肇祥）
繼在運動相機市場取得成功後，空拍機大廠 DJI 再度跨足全景相機領域。今日在台正式推出DJI Osmo 360 全景相機，機身輕巧便攜，卻能支援 8K 原生解析度全景影片及 1.2 億像素的全景照片，完美捕捉周圍 360 度的所有影像細節。
DJI Osmo 360 採用訂製的正方形 CMOS 感光元件，與主流的 4:3 比例不同，能在全景拍攝的時候額外使用 25% 的 CMOS 的面積，減少無謂的耗損，是其能達到 8K 解析度與 1.2 億畫素的關鍵。此外，這塊感光元件在色彩表現也不遑多讓，支援 13.5 檔的高動態範圍、 10-bit 等級的色彩，還有 f/1.9 大光圈使進光量提升 4 倍以上，即便在夜晚或昏暗場景，搭配超級夜景模式也能讓畫面依舊清晰。
請繼續往下閱讀…
DJI Osmo 360 機身僅 183 公克重，減輕了使用拍攝感的手腕負擔，且內建了105GB儲存空間，就算忘了攜帶記憶卡也能拍。（圖／記者黃肇祥）
在錄影規格上，全景模式最高可達 8K/50fps，慢動作則有 4K/100fps。即使是單鏡頭的平面影片，也能達到 5K/60fps 的高畫質，並允許使用 D-Log M 模式，為後製提供更多彈性。續航與散熱方面，DJI 承諾在 8K/30fps 下可連續錄影 100 分鐘，6K 則可錄製 190 分鐘。
知名攝影師、創作者「查理學攝影」搶先實測 DJI Osmo 360 並分享，以往全景相機的收音效果不佳，單鏡頭模式的實用性也較低，但透過 OsmoAudio 功能，讓 DJI Osmo 360 可銜接 DJI 產品生態系，其中就包含了麥克風，大幅提升收音品質與實用性，讓 DJI Osmo 360 能夠實現手機、運動相機與全景相機的三合一用途。此外，他也認為全新的手機 App DJI Mimo 與電腦軟體 DJI Studio 降低了使用門檻，使用者可輕鬆套用多種濾鏡及特效，使影片處理更為簡便。
雖然全景相機主要是通過多鏡頭運作，但也可以只啟用單顆鏡頭，當作運動、Vlog 相機使用，本身就有超廣角的寬闊視野。（圖／記者黃肇祥）
DJI Osmo 360 在台共推出兩種套裝。標準組售價 13,980 元，內含一顆電池、保護套、保護袋等配件。暢拍套裝售價 17,800 元，則額外提供三顆電池、多功能電池收納盒、可調節快拆轉接元件、1.2 公尺隱形自拍桿，以及與標準套組相同的保護套組。
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