This Little Smartphone Gimbal Is A BEAST (Zhiyun Smooth Q2 First Impressions)

The Zhiyun Smooth Q2 is the gimbal company's latest smartphone gimbal, and it really does pack a punch in a tiny package. What's up everybody, my name is Alex Chung, and today I'm talking about what I liked, and what I think could be changed about this new gimbal. So first of all, let's get some specs out of the way. This new gimbal is only 8 inches tall if you don't include the smartphone with it. The battery lasts up to 17 advertised hours, and it recharges via USB-C. It's compatible with any smartphone as long as that smartphone has Bluetooth functionality. The Q2 has three little buttons on the front, the joystick, the power button, and the record button, and it's got five different shooting modes, the pan follow, the follow, lock mode, POV, and vortex mode. All right, so let's go over some of the things that I liked about this new gimbal, starting with the motors. I'm pretty impressed that even though the motors on this gimbal are super tiny compared to the DSLR gimbals, the footage isn't really shaky at all, and if you do somehow get a little bit of shakiness in your footage, it's nothing that warp stabilizers can't fix in post. And I know that for some smartphone gimbals, you have to be sort of really delicate with the way you use the gimbal, but with this one, like I said, I've been using it just like when I'm using DSLR gimbals, and it looks like I'm shooting with a really high-end gimbal. I'm also really impressed with the size and the build quality of this new gimbal. This little thing actually fits into my pockets. Hold on one sec, one sec, I'll show you. I am literally able to... Watch, look at this. I'm legit able to fit this entire thing into my pocket like no problem. I'm wearing joggers right now. The pockets in these pants are a little bit deeper than my regular jeans, but nonetheless, I'm able to just fit the entire thing and just take it out really easily. It makes it really easy to just throw into your backpack or your travel bag and just go and shoot. Unlike some of the other smartphone gimbals, it doesn't really actually need a tripod feed. It actually does stand on its own. This gimbal is super solid. It's made out of entirely metal, and on the handle, it's got this little silicone cover on it, so it grips a lot easier. It's a lot more comfortable to hold, and you can hold it for a little bit longer. Another thing that I like is how the smartphone clamp is actually detachable from the gimbal itself. This makes it a lot easier to clamp on the phone. Sometimes, I don't know about you, but I have trouble with putting the phone onto the clamp itself, especially when it's on the gimbal. But now, I have an easy time to just put the phone onto the gimbal without really having to mess around with it too much. And this just makes it a lot easier for you to film something on the gimbal, take your phone off, post it online really quickly, and put your phone right back onto the gimbal super quickly. You can now connect your smartphone via Bluetooth. You don't have to go into an app to actually connect through Wi-Fi or connect through Bluetooth. You just simply turn on your Bluetooth from your phone, and you're able to see the Smooth Q2 pop up on the list. You connect to it, and there you go. You're in, you're done. And when you need to record, you simply press the record button, and it'll send that signal to your phone, and it'll immediately start recording. Speaking of buttons, like I mentioned, there's only three little buttons on the front. It's a really clean interface. There's no trigger button. There's no zoom control. It's very clean. It's very simple. The battery life is excellent, and it charges via USB-C. It's supposed to last up to 17 hours, which is insane. And I've been using this for like a full day, and it's only drained about half of the battery life. Now, let's go over some of the things that I would have liked to see changed about this gimbal. Okay, so right now, I'm about to get into some of the stuff that I didn't like so much about the Q2. However, I recently spoke to Zhiyun, and they told me that all these problems that I'm about to mention right here in the video are actually going to be fixed in an upcoming software update. And I'll leave a little note down here, just so that you guys can sort of understand which ones they're fixing. And so just please keep that in mind when you're watching this part of the video. All right, back to it. And starting with the shooting modes. Now, I don't really have a problem with the shooting modes itself. It's more about how you switch from shooting mode to shooting mode. You see, on the higher-end gimbals like the Crane 2 or the Crane 3, when you're switching from, let's say, the pan follow mode to the lock mode or pan follow mode to the follow mode, the gimbal doesn't actually reset the motors and put your camera back to its original state. Instead, it just leaves the camera at whatever position it had before it switched modes. But with the Q2, it resets the gimbal to its original state. Right now, I have the gimbal on pan follow mode. I've actually tilted the camera down a little bit so you can see what I mean. If I switch over to lock mode right now, see that? It'll reset the camera to its original state. In these couple of seconds where you're switching between and sending up the shot, you might miss something. Hopefully, this issue is something that can be fixed in a future firmware update. Another thing that I don't really like about this gimbal is the way you shoot with wide-angle lens from my Google Pixel 2 XL, and I've got that mounted on my camera right now. When you're using these wider-angle lenses, you will see this roll axis right here in the back of the gimbal, and you'll see it in your shot. And I'm pretty sure with smartphones that have these wide-angle lenses built right into the camera, this will certainly be a problem for them. Now, the easiest solution would be to simply just tilt the gimbal down a little bit just to get this roll axis out of the frame, but the solution only works in pan follow or vortex mode. If you try it in either the lock mode or the follow mode, it's impossible to get rid of the roll axis out of the shot, and it'll always follow the gimbal wherever it goes, so it's always gonna be constantly in your wide-angle shots. I would have loved to see this gimbal be designed the way a traditional DSLR gimbal is, where this axis, the roll axis, is actually in the back of the camera, and that will solve any problems that you would have with wide-angle lenses on your smartphone. And the current design isn't the best suited for low-angle shots. If I actually try to go lower, it'll hit the back of this gimbal arm right here, and you can actually see that bump in the footage. And that means I would have to tilt down a little bit lower in order to straighten out the camera, which makes it just a little bit more inconvenient to use. Now, something that they can't fix in a firmware update would be these four little indicator lights to show you which mode that you're on. You've got five different modes, but only four different indicator lights. They've hidden the indicator for the Vortex mode inside the POV mode. I would have liked to see a fifth indicator light just for the Vortex mode, but I think they were just trying to save space, and they went with grouping with the POV indicator light. You'll know when you're in Vortex mode when the POV light is flashing like this, and when your camera is facing up towards the sky. Now, I wish that they had locking mechanisms for the gimbal arms. Right now, it only has this little sort of clipping action going on for just one of the axes. If I let go of this thing, you can see that it swings around like this. So I would have really liked to have seen locking mechanisms on the gimbal arms, just like the Weebill Lab and the Crane 3. But that's it. Those are my first impressions of this tiny little gimbal. The DreamSmooth Q2 is actually on Kickstarter, and you can back this product and pre-order it. You can find a link down below in the description. My name is Alex Chung, and I'll see you later. Bye.