On this video review by our colleague photographer and videographer Curtis Judd, we look at a new and very capable compact gimbal for smartphone from the Chinese manufacturer Zhiyun.
Zhiyun created one of the mostly highly reviewed compact camera gimbals around called the Zhiyun Crane (see a review that we published here). The new Zhiyun SmoothQ is aimed at smartphones which has a built-in 26650 Li-ion battery with a stated 12-hour continuous work and a USB connector for charging your smartphone while you are not using the gimbal.
With the upcoming app the gimbal will be able to better track people it is very very simple to setup according to Judd and you can control the entire shoot from the buttons on the long handle.
The gimbal is less than 0.5kg which means that you will be able to hand hold it for a long time. You can pan and tilt and record from the handle and it has 3 modes – pan following mode (will slowly pan but won’t tilt), locking mode (keeps the camera pointed in the same direction no matter what you do) and a pan/tilt mode (it will pan and tilt slowly).
The Zhiyun SmoothQ has a 1/4″ 20 hole on the base of the gimbal which allows you to connect the unit to a tripod or a monopod (Judd used it with a monopod to create crane like shots in a very simple but effective way that you can see in the video).
You can get the Zhiyun SmoothQ on Amazon for just under $140 which is very competitively priced for this type of product and these capabilities.
You can check out more of Judd’s videos which focus mostly on audio and video here on LensVid.
Iddo Genuth 
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