I've been using this gimbal for a few weeks. Generally recommended.
Things to know: the Zhiyun app is very buggy and unreliable, but necessary if you want to do timelapse and vertigo and other features. It works and has got lots of good features, but every other time I open it, the interface for a different Zhiyun shows up and only part of the features are available. It seems like it's suffering from random bugs and general user-side inconsistencies. The Share function, for instance, shows a row of buttons without legends, and most of them are Chinese networks like WeChat that I don't use; the Facebook export doesn't work for me, just sending me to an unauthorised Web error. However, FiLMiC Pro (a $25 app, very powerful) supports the device's most video features, so there's no need to tap the phone screen too much when using FiLMiC. If you want to take vertical Instagram Stories videos, it's possible in both apps, but you need to turn the gimbal off and unscrew and turn and screw in again. So it's not easy to switch orientations on the fly like at least one other gimbal I've heard of. Also, you can't film direct to Instagram since you need to keep your finger on the record button on-screen, so to take advantage of the hardware buttons you have to film in FiLMiC or Zhiyun's app and then transfer to Instagram somehow (seems like InShot is a good choice). So those are the software-based limitations. On the hardware side it's rather good—I love hardware buttons and the less I have to tap the screen the happier I am. Smoothly zooming with the side wheel (the cheapest looking part of the device, btw, but still seems solid enough) and changing exposure with the other wheel is so much better than messing around on an iPhone screen. The Smooth 4 feels solid and good quality in general. The screw-on tripod works well. The battery is huge, only requiring recharging after lots of use. I bought a tiny USB cable (not included!) to charge the phone while using it (shooting 4K video on my iPhone 7 drains the battery fast) so the gimbal replaces an external battery and a tripod as well as the stabilisation features. The smoothness is really good for panning and walking (I'm still perfecting the "ninja" walk so footage doesn't bob up and down, however smoothly) so with some practice the results look like they were shot on wheels. The in-camera software stabilisation (at least in my case) needs to be left on (in FiLMiC Pro; I think it's always on in the Zhiyun app). Sometimes the motors panic and try to go too far resulting in an alarming shake; usually this occurs when I'm in Lock mode and go too far in the wrong direction. No big deal. When double-hitting the Following Mode Button (bottom one on the "other" side) the motors reset to centre (tilt and roll) but I wish it did it a bit faster and/or smoothly. It always starts by gliding for a second and then abruptly shifting into place; this feels like an error that could be fixed in future Firmware updates, but maybe it's a necessary feature that I don't understand. What else… This device doesn't have an Inception mode like another new gimbal out there.
To conclude, I'm satisfied for my tinkering because the price was good; I haven't tried any other gimbals but from what I've seen on YouTube there are quite a few good ones (i.e DJI Osmo, more expensive in Australia, and the new Mini something which is foldable, has Inception mode, can switch orientation on the fly, and is actually cheaper in the US but maybe not available in Australia yet). There are lots of little annoyances I tried to list here but honestly, for the price, it's worth it. Like with any tool, I need to find the best way to get it to work for me; I'm still searching.
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