Earlier I shared my thoughts on the German-made Eckla
Eagle door mount. I now will be doing the same for the South African-made Gimpro door mount.
This comes in at around a little less than 9,900 South African Rands. It's already been assembled.
It has already been attached to the side of the car. I'm not going spend much
time on explaining how this is done. There is a useful 10-minute video prepared by the
manufacturers of the Gimpro which explains in detail how this is done. I should just say that
the mounting system you'll notice is very different from the Eagle. This has two brackets
either side of the mount which clasp onto the two sides of the door. What you'll also notice here is
that these brackets have got leather cladding on the inside to protect the body work of your car.
Just for double safety I've placed an additional strip here of duct tape just for peace of mind.
Just a word of warning about the assembly of the mount and its position on the door;
some cars like mine have a front mirror that can fold back,
just make sure that there is enough space between this particular lever here and the
front mirror. I will just press the button here which shows that
my mirror can close, just make sure that there is enough space between these two for this to happen.
The Gimpro comes with an arm that can swivel as I'm showing here and it is on to this particular
arm that you attach all of your cameras. At the bottom comes this attachment plate
there are grooves cut in the sides of this arm. You simply place
the device down and attach it and this is a 3/8 inch bolt
to which I will attach my leveling head. What I'm going to do is simply remove this, attach it to
the leveling head and then put my entire apparatus onto this arm. So I'm going to do that now.
Here is the fluid head and underneath that is the leveling head which I discussed
in my earlier video. So I'm just going to attach this base plate,
simple matter of turning that on until it's secure and I'll slip this on to the arm, tighten this and
there is my fluid head, leveling head secured to the arm. You'll notice that the arm
has the advantage that it swivels so you can in fact position
your leveling head in a number of places. I'll say more about this a little later.
Let me as a final step attach my camera which I've done here.
And there we are - good to go. There is a potential difficulty with this particular
mount that I must mention and it relates to the effectiveness of these attaching brackets
and in particular how effective they are at attaching to a car door with an angular side which
mine has over here. You'll notice that this slopes quite steeply and this means that the bracket over
here has a tendency to slip downwards. Now, the Gimpro mount does come with a small clip,
which again its use is illustrated in the 10 minute video that I referred to earlier,
which is intended to stop this bracket from creeping downwards. In the case of my door
which has quite an extreme angle this particular method did not work, it didn't prevent the bracket
from slipping downwards. I think this is a unique problem with my particular vehicle because of its
very angular door. I've looked at the doors of other vehicles Toyota Prado, Toyota Fortuner and
land rovers where the side of the door is far less angular and this particular problem doesn't arise.
So I needed to find a solution to stop this from slipping, and what I did was
come up with a supporting strap with a clasp on the end. And what I did was I placed this
clasp over the rails that I have here, the roof rails.
This particular strap that I had with me wasn't quite long enough so I needed
to extend it with a cable tie,
and what I did was I threaded the
end of this around one end of the door mount as I've done here and then
simply tighten the strap as I will do now and having done so this secured the door mount.
A disadvantage of this of course is that you'll do this inside of the car in which case you
can't open the door like this. But opening it of course is a simple matter I just pressed this,
removed the bracket and I could open the door, took a few seconds. So with this particular
mechanism in place I found that there was absolutely no slippage at
all driving eight hours on a bumpy dirt road this particular mount remained perfectly
in place, but as I've said I think the need for this particular support is peculiar to my car
because of the shape of the size of the door and I haven't tried this on other vehicles but I suspect
that this problem won't arise with them. So I've mentioned a potential difficulty with Gimpro mount
in so far as my car is concerned. Let me discuss some of its nice features. Let me first just
secure the mounts with the supporting strap as I've done here, nice and solid. You'll notice
that this arm can swing as I mentioned earlier. So this gives one the option of bringing the camera
right into the car if conditions are windy. And windy conditions, of course, causes your camera
to vibrate and this results in a shaky image. So you can bring your camera right into your car
sliding this mount as afar as it will go here and you can also do the opposite,
you can swing your camera out of the vehicle and this helps if you want to focus on an animal,
say walking in the road in front of you, you can swing your camera out in such a way and
you can focus on objects in the road
in front of you and in fact even objects on the opposite side of the road.
And you can film them from this position so the maneuverability of this car door
mount allows I think is its main strength, of course it is also rock solid.
this sliding this mounts as far as it'll go here. And you can also do the opposite, you can swing
This moves not at all, there is no camera shake when mounted to
and it's also fairly clear that since it's attached outside of the door it does not
interfere with the operation of the window. I can close the window here even with the strap on.
So in summary my experiences of the Gimpro door mount and the Eckla Eagle door mount
is positive. I've enjoyed shooting with both the video that I've managed to shoot has been
very steady and I'm very pleased with it so I can certainly recommend both of these mounts.