Ahoj! This is Zdenka. This year I told myself that I'm on a mission. I amm on a mission
to find the best smartphone gimbal of 2020 and this year I already reviewed quite a lot
of smartphone gimbals. I would say, in my opinion,
that I have here about 3 or 4 top ones and I am gonna make a proper comparison of those
gimbals in a week or two, so make sure you subscribe. But today we're gonna look at one
of the top 3 ones. The Smart XR. This is not a paid ad or anything like that. Pergear.com
online store which has everything when it comes
to filming needs offered me this gimbal for a review. All it took was one look and I knew
that this is it. That focus wheel. There are big companies out there which dominate the
market when it comes to smartphone gimbals. They've
been around for a while. Everybody already knows them. Here and there though somebody
new pops in and literally steals the attention. I admit that I never heard about this company
before. In fact, I don't even know how to pronounce it properly. I did research online,
I couldn't find it. I don't want to do the injustice to them and say it wrong way, so
I'm not gonna say it at all. I'm just gonna display the name right here. I think they
deserve to have their name pronounced properly. Hopefully by next time I will know already
how to say it. I'm one of those people which don't care really about huge brands. I am
looking for a certain product to be perfectly clear.
I am looking for a certain product with certain functions. When you receive the gimbal, you're
going to get just a normal packaging, nothing extremely fancy. Is this a problem? No.
Packaging doesn'thelp filming my videos. I care about the thing inside. Inside will be
gimbal, little tripod, type c usb charging cable, hand rope and user manual. This gimbal
smart XR is foldable. Motors can be locked to prevent
from swinging but when you think about it, you can actually use it as a selfie stick
in vertical position as well. The gimbal weighs 375g
battery included and that is another huge plus about this gimbal. You can actually exchange
the battery here. It has a removable battery, it uses 18650 lithium battery which lasts
about 8 hours. The charging time for this battery is about 2 hours and 40 minutes. Eight
hours is okay but it's not really that much. But what you can do, you can buy two extra
batteries for example or just one, charge them, bring
them with you, once the one battery is done, then you just pop in another one and you are
off to go. So you can pretty much film however long you want to. You can also charge your
phone from the gimbal while using it via micro usb port which is just sweet, amazing for
traveling. I was always wondering about those gimbals
with built-in batteries. Once the battery goes, does the whole thing go actually to
a garbage? Another thing with those gimbals with built-in batteries. If you let's say
forget to charge your gimbal and you need to go to an event
or something and you have only a little bit battery left, the battery dies, then you can't
film anymore. You just have to charge it and wait
until it's charged. You can't film. But with this one pop in the fresh battery and you're
off to go. The maximum payload is 250g and the mobile phones should be in width between
55 and 90mm. I went ahead and I unlocked the three
motors. Now I placed my smartphone iphone 11pro in and balanced it. And now it's time
to turn that on. The gimbal feels really solid. It
doesn't feel cheap at all. You can tell the motors are quite strong because it has this
focus wheel here and a lot of buttons in the front. If you have big hands I would suggest
just pulling the tripod down like this extending
the grip and it already feels so much better. I actually like the fact that the tripod is
not too big. The app you need to download for this
gimbal is AC Play. It's super easy. Just enable bluetooth and it finds it right away. I had
no problems pairing it. Let's look at the gimbal interface. There is a beautiful little
display which shows exactly what mode you are using. Below is joystick, M button, power
button and record button. On the side is focus wheel and zoom button. I'm going to start
with power button. Turn it on, turn it off. When
you press one time,you can switch between horizontal and vertical filming. Next is joystick.
Here goes another huge bonus for this gimbal. You can actually change the gimbal modes with
a press of a joystick button. That means that you can change the gimbal mode in any other
app. Left, right, up and down is straight forward.
When you double press the joystick you will re-center the gimbal. When you press one time,
this is when you change the modes. F means all follow mode, full lock mode, POV mode
which is the airplane point of view. It follows pretty
much all your moves. PF is pan follow mode. This is when the tilt is locked. If you press
the joystick 3x, you will get into DM which is
inception mode and it goes on its own automatically so it means that it goes only in one direction.
You cannot spin it the other way manually with a joystick. That's too bad. I just
want too much. If you press and hold, it will go into GO which is as they say mad dog mode.
The M button allows you to switch between filming in automatic mode and manual mode.
Simply long press the M button and you will see the
manual filming here. I'm going to show the manual filming a little bit later in today's
video. I definitely want to talk about that. Here we
have the focus wheel. First of all, when you tap on the screen, you can select the focus
and exposure or brightness. when you tap and hold you can lock it. When you want to do
a focus pull as you are filming or manually focus,
that is when you use the wheel. How smooth it is? I'm going to do a little test here.
Here is a sample video, you be the judge on your own.
Digital zoom is up to 5x so let me show you that as well. Now, all this would be happening
if you would be filming in the AC Play app. And I already know that a lot of you will
ask how is it going to work if you're going to
be filming in native camera app or Filmic Pro or Protake or any other app. If I'm in
the native camera app for example, what can I do here.
I can certainly change gimbal modes here which is huge. I cannot use focus wheel, I cannot
use zoom button and I cannot use record button. I have to tap on the screen to record.
The same will happen with all other apps. This is the main reason it is the best to
use AC Play app. That app is actually very good so let's go back to it. Test time. How
is the stabilization of the gimbal? Well, it is not
ultra light which could mean that it could be quite stable so I'm going to do few tests
now and as always, first it's going to be the hard
walk, then it's going to be the soft ninja walk and then I'm going to go for full speed
run. What is the range of those motors? Pan horizontal rotation is 340 degrees, the roll
angle is 330 degrees and tilt angle is 110 degrees.
What do you get with Iphones and more importantly what do you get with Androids? Is there any
difference? Well, first goes iphone 11pro. Let's see what's inside of the app. Let's
start with video resolution and frame rates. You can film in 4K, 1080p and 720p in 24 frames
per second, 30 frames per second and 60 frames per
second. What else do we have on the left side of the app? Let's press settings. You can
select timer, turn on flash or continuous light. Camera settings allows you many adjustments
like photo size, turning on horizontal line, bluetooth radio and here you can adjust your
zoom speed. You can also adjust the zoom speed in main settings interface. Gimbal settings
is next. Here you can really customize everything.
You can adjust tilt and pan motor, follow speed, follow dead area, joystick speed, you
can actually make the up movement faster and side
movement slower if you want to and you can reverse the joystick if that works better
for you. You can turn on the grid and shoot in manual mode and choose lens you want to
film with. Just press the lens selection to switch between
telephoto, standard lens and ultra wide angle lens. Can you see the motor if you are filming
with the ultra wide angle lens? Yes, you can a bit. You can move the phone a bit to
the left when you need to film with the ultra wide angle lens. It will work the motors harder
though and drain your battery faster. Below we
have huge filters section. Click on that. First we have beauty filter. Here you can
select brighten, tone level. Let's click on the filter section. It is huge selection of
filters. You can choose from each category like food girl,
vso, romantic, black and white, gopro out, movie style. It takes you to large selections
so you can choose the right finish, color scheme
for your videos. I'm still going to leave the manual filming for a little bit later.
Let's go to the right side of the app. First is intelligent shooting. You can do your inception
mode, one click and it will create the shot for
you. Then we have hitchcock. This is the old zoom in while zooming out trick. This one
you can really customize. You can control the zoom speed
during start and end and also shooting time. Last one is motion shot which is the motion
time lapse. You can select up to 6 position and select duration. You cannot select interval
here. Next we have panorama. You can do 180, 330
degrees, 3x3 or 3x5. You can take photos, you can film video, you can do slow motion
here in 1080p or 720p in 240 frames per second and also
120 frames per second. You cannot do them in 4k. You can do time lapse which has the
same thing like in the intelligent shooting except you can also select shutter interval
here and you can also do multi-lens filming. It's a similar
thing like Filmic Pro has. You can record yourself and at the same time film with one
of those rear cameras. It allows you to choose which
one you want. You can see it side by side or you can see this view. You can do this
in 24, 25 and 30 frames per second. What else is here? You can switch between rear and front
camera here. Here is face tracking. I actually noticed
that it is only working with rear cameras. If I am tracking myself in selfie camera mode,
it's not moving. It might be a bug. I don't know
but if you go to gesture control, the tracking yourself here works amazing here. It actually
starts on its own. Not sure, perhaps it's meant that way. Now I want to show you filming
in manual mode. Let's long press the M button to pull out the manual filming. What I like
is that it shows very clearly and easily. You can either bring the exposure up or down,
you can select manual shutter speed, iso, white balance,
manual focus and manual zoom. The obvious question needs to be answered next and that
is, can we use variable nd filter or any filters with this? Can we actually mount external
lenses or other lenses on the smartphone? Well, I went ahead and I attached to this
very lightweight filter. As you can tell, there is no hole
to attach the counterweights, so right now the gimbal is not balanced at all. It's not
balanced. I'm gonna turn it on regardless and the motors are quite strong, it works
fine but for sure because it's not balanced properly, it's
gonna drain the batteries much faster. So I would highly suggest to get some sort of
counterweights. Still make sure you are under the
maximum payload of 250g. Just to compare iphone 11 pro without a case is 188g so there is
quite a lot of room. The motors are strong. Now last two days I've been looking for like
crazy for some type of a counterweights. You know
like a clip on or clamp on directly on the end of the phone. I could not find anything
though. I'm not sure if there's anything like that on
the market. If you know about such a thing, please don't be shy and write it in the comment
section below. I think that a lot of people including me would really appreciate that,
so thank you in advance if you're gonna do that.
I also went as far as head as testing the external microphone with this app with the
AC Play app. If you would be filming yourself on a
smartphone, I'm right next to the highway so you're probably catching some sound from
the cars but I'm gonna go ahead. Now I'm gonna attach the external microphone to see if this
app is actually taking the sound from the microphone.
And that will be a sound check with the microphone attached to the smartphone. I'm standing right
next to the highway so you might be probably hearing a lot of sound there but
that's the sound you would get if you would be recording yourself in AC Play app. Android
users, what are the limitations? I actually think
you'll be quite pleased. The only thing you're not going to get is 24 frames per second,
it's simply not there. You cannot film in 24 frames per second but you can film in 4k,
1080p and 720p in 30 frames per second, 60 frames
per second and slow motion is there as well. And you can also film in manual mode and you
also can switch all the lenses. What are my thoughts?
This is so close, so close to be the best gimbal of 2020. I just need to find that counterweight
solution.Ii wish the hole was there so I can just screw it on but you know some clamp
or something. That just needs to be solved. The only thing I didn't like about the gimbal
and I don't like about the gimbal is the inception mode. I wish I could simply manually rotate
the roll motor and I could actually turn it in the other direction as well. That would
give me a lot more creativity. Otherwise when you think about it, it's got pretty much everything
for basic filming and more advanced filming. If I wanted to film in Filmic Pro or Protake
and all that I could because I can switch the modes with the press of a joystick button.
But everything else I would have to press, tap
on the screen with my finger. And as always, link to Smart XR can be found below the video
just in a video description. It will show you
pricing in your currency depending on where you live. Hit the thumbs up if you liked today's
video and subscribe to future videos. Don't forget there is the big comparison of three
or four top gimbals of 2020 coming up. Those
are the gimbals I had a chance to review. I'm sure there are more on the market. If
you have any questions, comments or simply want to say Hi
or Ahoj, you know what to do. You can always leave in the comment section below. See you
in the next video. Cau..... Ahoj......