I have right here the Xiaomi Mijia three axis gimbal so this is for the media
4k action cam that I reviewed about two months ago quite a decent action cam for
the price but it does have one problem with 4k footage and that is it doesn't
have any electronic image stabilization only in 1080p so with us gimbal
hopefully we can smooth out that footage and remove those shakes and tremors that
you often see so the gimbal you can see there weighs 340 grams it has a five
thousand milliamp hour battery and I think that battery can actually charge
the camera too at the same time so you can go for longer recording so we'll
check out and see what we get inside the box the contents and see it comes here
with factory wrapped which is good that means that no one else has messed around
with us comes with some instructions here these are unfortunately all in
Chinese but not to worry I will explain how to operate it and it's fairly
straightforward and easy and we get a micro USB to cable here for charging the
gimbal so the build quality of this gimbal is excellent we've got this nice
matte style plastic here status LED here to let us know our battery life now out
of the box mine's got 100 percent you can see here so each of those LEDs of course
equates to 25 percent battery just to power it on is this button here which is
also the start and stop record button then we have the snapshot button to take
a photo and this of course is the joystick there to control the gimbal
status LED telling us well that's red because we haven't got at the moment the
camera plugged into it on the side here we have a flat for the micro USB to port
to charge that 5000 milliamp hour battery this has a rubber grip to it
which feels good in hand and then we have the trigger here I'll explain how
this works later amah this is basically to hold the position of the gimbal and
then this little switch here which is spring-loaded is our control there for
the cameras exposure and on the bottom we also have a standard thread there so
you can mount this gimbal to a tripod if you wanted to
so unlike the base which has plastic the top part here is all made out of metal
so we have the brace and of course the three motors in here
which control each individual access they're controlling it to keep things
stable Micro USB to port here which plugs directly into the camera and this
has rubber in the inside of it which is very well done and you can also cause
screw that into place to secure the camera in there so putting the camera
into place is quite easy you just need to make sure the end with the plug on it
that you have the little flap open of course and then press this right in here
and it should then align up with that micro USB 2 port and then clips into
place there the last step of course is to screw the thread in so then the
camera is locked into that gimbal and there's no way that is going to come out
now one good thing that they've designed to show me here is that we can still
open the flap on the bottom to at least get our micro SD cards out so I've just
flipped it around because it's hard to show you the screen when it's in the
gimbal here so once you plug it in you get this new little icon here that pops
up on the touch menu and this controls the gimbal settings so we've got
different scene modes we've got sport normal you can see here normal sport and
in where and custom which you can tweak via the application you can invert the
the pan direction the your direction and the pitch direction as well if you
wanted to do that our device info just gives you and throw on the gimbals model
the firmware version it has so this is probably one of the earlier ones I don't
know how they're going to push the updates out for this it might be via the
camera I guess is how you update it all via your PC I don't have any details on
that whatsoever course instructions are all in Chinese and restore factory
settings
just to put out a couple of things - with the gimbal that when you power it
on it pals on the camera automatically you don't need to turn the camera on
separately and charging the gimbal with the camera attached will also charge the
camera so here I'm just panning around with my hand just moving very slowly you
can see the image is pretty steady I mean it's not homeless in perfect and
just walk towards my scooter here I'll give you a sample - with alpha gimbal so
you can see just the kind of difference it is it's pretty much like day and
night let's do a reasonably good Charter so that's not to run now
and then I'll just pan around slightly using the joystick
it takes a little bit of practice joystick to get the movement nice and
slow
and now the same as before but as you can see it's all shaky because not using
the gimbal and if I run again
and see the huge difference that makes and then panning it around myself here
and how doesn't too bad I don't have the steadiest of hands
and now this is the locking mode so I'm gonna keep it pointing towards the coast
here hold down the trigger now and just keep walking it should keep aiming in
that direction so it's another way you can get some interesting shots with this
and you can see just how well that stabilization is working there just
remember that in 4k this does not have any electronic image stabilization at
all in 1080p you do have electronic image stabilization so it will be even
smoother now you can also use the gimbal inverted so it's around the other way at
the moment and because you can get more interesting shots using that to get down
really low for example
so it's pretty flexible and the different kind of modes you can use it
and to quickly test out that selfie mode so three quick texts
and now you can see me of course and then frequent taps again it should point
back that way now to test it out riding my scooter so you know hold it with one
hand on the scooter and then just accelerate off all right so there we go
that is the gimble here for the show-me 4k action cam and over I feel it's
really good I mean the build quality is typical Xiaomi it's excellent really
well put together I love the fact that we can see the battery level on the back
with the four status LEDs we have on there now a better life it is looking
like it is going to work for six to eight hours like they claim well they
came up to eight hours but in my time using it for approximately two hours I
lost one dot there one of the LEDs went out and it started flashing on the NEX
so that means I've lost somewhere between like 25 percent battery in those
two hours so I feel that yes it could be closer around eight hours perhaps about
six or seven hours there on battery life so the use of it it's quite easy of
course nice for that joystick so we can decide to for example if you want to
hold keep the camera looking in one direction then you can press that lock
it in place there and the different modes like tapping it to spin the whole
camera around into the selfie mode that's quite handy the battery charging
is a little bit interesting here now I don't know whether it's because I'm on a
early firmware version I need to update the firmware on the camera but I've
noticed that when you first power it on yes it will charge the camera but later
on in use I've noticed when you have a look at the battery bar it's not green
green means it's charging and it's not charging so it's kind of on and off so
that I feel they need to work on hopefully show me is going to have a
firmware update to address that and fix that problem the other problem is the
application for it I've gone to me home I've had a look on the internet I can't
find anything that addresses the actual gimbal itself now it may be via firmware
updates or something how we update the the gimbal or we need to use me home
with the camera because I can connect up me home to the camera but it doesn't
give me any other settings therefore the gimbal so maybe that hasn't been
implemented yet so be aware of that it's just Auto
power-down that's what that noise was there so yeah it is quite a decent
gimbal so does it apply to everyone should everyone get this if they're
going to be using this I feel if you're going to be shooting 4k a lot and
handheld go for it because it does make a huge difference because 4k video
doesn't have any stabilization and as you've seen from my sample images there
that it you know it really does make a huge difference to get the shock out the
shocks and the shakes all out of the video there is there's a tiny little bit
of movement you can see it's not perfect but it does make a big difference but if
you're someone that plans to use the 4k camera on a chest mount or in your
helmet mount or something like that then you can't take really any advantage at
all of the gimbal but the gimbal they have shown impressed
images can be mounted to handlebars and other areas and things like that they've
got like a round bracket that were gone here and then mount onto your standard
GoPro style mounting equipment so I feel mainly just for handheld users to go for
this really out roll but for the hundred and fourteen u.s. price it currently has
I feel it's not a bad purchase but yeah as I mentioned only if you're really
going to be getting the full advantage of it so you've mostly shoot hand how
like dogs or your kids or something like that then that is where this comes in
handy here and it is a shame that we can't use this with other devices so you
can't use this for the GoPro you can't use it with the cell phone it would have
been nice if they had some way of maybe an adapter that you could put in here
and then connect up a GoPro I'll get it to hold onto a GoPro other action cams
or hold on to a mobile phone would it be nice but I guess this is designed really
it's only just for this device here so thanks a lot for watching this review I
do have to see you back and the channel with more up-and-coming reviews bye for
now