Zhiyun Z1 Smooth-C
Anyone can make pro-quality movies with this iPhone stabilizer
$230 Manufacturer Zhiyun, zhiyun-tech.com Features Three-axis gimbal camera mount with counterweight and electronic gyroscope
Though the iPhone is capable of taking extremely high quality video, that doesn’t mean everything you take with it will look beautiful. Even if you know how to compose and capture light well in a shot, if you’re holding your iPhone in your hands, you’re likely to produce slightly shaky and jerky footage. The iPhone stabilizes video as best it can (and the optical image stabilizer in the iPhone 6s Plus works with video, which helps a lot), but you’ll still never get it looking really professional. That’s where the Smooth-C comes in.
This is an iPhone holder with a built-in gimbal, meaning that it keeps the iPhone stable no matter how your hand moves when gripping the handle. You just slot the iPhone into the cradle and turn it on, and the iPhone locks into a position pointing forward, after which you can pretty much rotate your hand around almost any way you want without upsetting your footage. It has two modes: one that keeps the iPhone always pointing forward, even if you rotate the Smooth-C left or right; and one that will turn the iPhone left or right with your hand (but with a delay, so it can even out jerkiness in the movement). Two buttons enable you to tilt the iPhone up or down.
The results are just brilliant. You can hold the iPhone out and walk forward, producing stunning 4K smooth video, as if using a professional Steadicam. You can walk forward to zoom without shaking all over the place, and swoop around a subject in an even motion. When your control over movement is increased, the iPhone really shows off what it can do with picture quality, too – it seems to focus faster than making the same moves handheld. It’s especially great if you like to record at 4K and then crop in for zoomed 1080p exports, since that method is especially vulnerable to the downsides of camera shake.
It’s not perfect, admittedly. Getting it set up is slightly confusing, not helped by the fact that there’s almost no labeling on the device (including its buttons), and the manual being hard to work through. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s fine. Our unit came with its horizontal angle slightly off, though, and recalibration – even using the companion Mac app, which we highly recommend as the easiest option – was a hazy process. It’s very hard to do in a way that you can be sure you’re improving things rather than throwing them further off.
the bottom line. Turns your iPhone into a truly amazing video camera, whether you want to film a short movie or just your family vacation. It has its confusing moments, though, and certainly isn’t cheap. Matt Bolton