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Review | Zhiyun Smooth X review: the world’s smallest powered smartphone gimbal is perfect for the selfie obsessed
- The Smooth X from Zhiyun is a folding powered gimbal that allows phone camera users to shoot smoother moving videos, and will support any smartphone
- The gimbal can track a moving object and will start with a gesture, but is less steady than three-axis gimbals. It can run for eight to 10 hours on one charge
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A smartphone gimbal – a pivoted support that allows a phone camera to shoot smoother moving videos – used to be a bulky thing. While still portable, they can’t exactly fit into pockets or small bags.
Last year drone maker DJI introduced the Osmo Mobile 3, which shrank the gimbal’s size by folding in half. Now Zhiyun, a rival manufacturer based, like DJI, in southern Chinese tech powerhouse Shenzhen, has gone one step further with the Zhiyun Smooth X, which also folds in half but is even smaller and lighter, making it the world’s smallest gimbal.
Design and hardware
The Zhiyun Smooth X makes a compromise to achieve its petite size. It is only a two-axis gimbal, meaning it can “pan” (horizontal left or right) and “roll” (rotate); it lacks the third axis, “yaw” (looking up and down a vertical plane).
For some serious videographers trying to shoot cinematic footage, not being able to yaw will be a deal breaker. But the Zhiyun Smooth X is aimed mostly at a different crowd: the selfie-obsessed.
To that end, the Smooth X has an extendable “neck” – just like a selfie stick – that extends up to 260mm (10.2 inches). It can also support the phone in landscape (sideways) and portrait (upright) orientations; the latter is crucial for shooting Instagram Stories or TikTok videos.
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