Chris Newman
March 16th, 2006, 05:33 PM
Here is a brief review of the VariZoom VZ Ultralite stabilizer:
To make a long story short, I had to return it due to major design flaws.
It had one major show-stopper flaw. The type of gimbal that they used works fine in the roll (dutch tilt) and pitch (tilt) directions, but it has a lot of friction in the yaw (pan) direction. In particular, it has static friction, so as your hand moves back and forth a little, it sticks and unsticks, and shakes the camera back and forth. I sent VariZoom tech support an email about this, which they never replied to. I expected them to say "It has to be broken in by doing..." or "You need to lubricate it by doing...", but I got no reply within a week, so I had to return it. (I did try grease, which had no effect.)
A minor flaw was the track for adjusting the balance in one direction was sloppy, so the camera would wobble sometimes, which shook the image.
Another minor flaw was the right-left camera balance adjustment could only move in one direction (at least very far), and my camera (Sony Z1U) is off balance in the other direction. I worked around this by turning the stabilizer 90 degrees to the right, so the arm sticks out to the right. That allowed adjustment in the right directions for my camera.
In conclusion, it was pretty unusable, so I designed and made my own that works a lot better. I may post some sample footage, and start selling them, but I have other design projects in the works too...
Chris
To make a long story short, I had to return it due to major design flaws.
It had one major show-stopper flaw. The type of gimbal that they used works fine in the roll (dutch tilt) and pitch (tilt) directions, but it has a lot of friction in the yaw (pan) direction. In particular, it has static friction, so as your hand moves back and forth a little, it sticks and unsticks, and shakes the camera back and forth. I sent VariZoom tech support an email about this, which they never replied to. I expected them to say "It has to be broken in by doing..." or "You need to lubricate it by doing...", but I got no reply within a week, so I had to return it. (I did try grease, which had no effect.)
A minor flaw was the track for adjusting the balance in one direction was sloppy, so the camera would wobble sometimes, which shook the image.
Another minor flaw was the right-left camera balance adjustment could only move in one direction (at least very far), and my camera (Sony Z1U) is off balance in the other direction. I worked around this by turning the stabilizer 90 degrees to the right, so the arm sticks out to the right. That allowed adjustment in the right directions for my camera.
In conclusion, it was pretty unusable, so I designed and made my own that works a lot better. I may post some sample footage, and start selling them, but I have other design projects in the works too...
Chris