Zhiyun Smooth-Q3

For casual content creators, TikTokers or young filmmakers, the Zhiyun Smooth-Q3 is a great accessory. At an affordable point, it brings the ability to shoot high-quality static footage with minimal effort. However, for anything other than that you better consider DJI OM 4, which offers an array of more advanced features to go with the original Gimbal experience.

Introduction

Zhiyun’s latest mobile gimbal tries its best to swipe the crown of DJI OM 4 and with similar features and more attractive price points.

With the rise of TikTok (and its many imitators), filming on smartphones is now much more popular than ever. For example, smartphone gimbals are perfectly positioned to help users get the most out of their handsets, offering stable, professional-level recording in a compact form factor. DJI is easily one of the most recognized brands in the state, but Chinese maker Xiun has been a tough competitor for several years now, and no more than its latest smartphone Gimbal.

At just £ 89, the Zhiyun Smooth-Q3 is already significantly more affordable than the J 139 sought-after price of the DJI OM 4. With such a significant price difference, it is clear that Xiun wants to reduce competition in a comprehensive way. Pay off strategy? After extensive testing, our verdict came.

Design

• Small enough to throw in a rucksack
• Easy to use for a long time
• Modified control scheme over Q2

As much as I like using DJI OM 4, one of the few problems with it is its size. It’s just a little too big, on the verge of ruining the portability factor that makes smartphone imaging so attractive in the first place.

In this regard, the Zhiyun Smooth-Q3 is much more in line with my taste, with a slim grip and a lightweight frame that comes in at just 340g, making it very easy to hold for a long time without fatigue.

Still, if you have a Zhiyun Smooth-Q2 in your collection, the Q3 has moved so far away from its predecessor that it would be easy to mistake it for a DJI gimbal at a glance. Nevertheless, it is a significant improvement. The grip is now designed to fit the hands more ergonomically, and the arm has been extended so that the components do not accidentally appear in the shot.

To accommodate the longer design, the Q3 uses a screw mechanism to hold the arm in place – when not in use, the hand slides down to rest just behind the handle. This system is not as modern as the folding design used by DJI, but it does the job.

The control interface has also been redesigned with a large thumbstick and record button, as well as a rear-facing trigger designed to refocus the camera during filming and allow quick switching between portrait and landscape modes with just three taps. The whole system feels a lot more intuitive to use and, once you wrap your head around all the different button prompts and shortcuts, the Q3 works great.

App

• Users can edit their footage through the ZY Cami app
• Some features are locked behind a wall

When used, all recordings with Zhiyun Smooth-Q3 are funneled through the ZY Cami app. Like the DJI Mimo app, there’s a great emphasis on the community, as you are immediately presented with an array of videos created by other users. While the videos on offer may seem highly curated, they provide at least some solid ideas on how you can make the most of your own Zhiyun gimbal.

If you already know what you want to film, or even the footage is ready to go, ZY Cami packs an array of editing options so you can finish your video right there on your phone. There are two main ways to edit (create and quick edit), both designed with different levels of skills in mind.

Create is a full-fat editing suite that offers a surprising amount of depth, including a free audio library, animated stickers, motion controls and even the ability to change shape proportions, just to name a few features.

QuickEdit does pretty much everything for you, with music, transitions and timed cuts automatically, all you need to do to create your social media feed is a few seconds. Although the limited nature of this mode does not appeal to my particular tastes, it is very convenient as a way to quickly compile footage on the go.

Unfortunately, there are some issues with sticking the editing component of the ZY Cami app. First, there’s an ever-present watermark that appears in the bottom left corner of any edited video, with no apparent option anywhere in the app to turn it off.

Second, it is impossible to render any edits in 4K without signing up for the paid Zhiyun Prim service. With a মূল 18 per year subscription, it’s not the most objectionable sale, but it makes it hard to recommend using the ZY Cami app for editing 4K footage while you can do it anywhere else without hassle.

Stability and performance

• Smooth-Q3 is incredibly forgiving and easy to use
• Some features do not work as well as DJI’s gimbals do
• The included fill light is perfect for selfies and low light scenes

Starting with the perfect basics, Zhiyun Smooth-Q3’s ability to effortlessly deliver stable footage is great. The Smooth-Q3 never slowed down during the test, and I even found the range of motion to be more forgiving than that of the DJI OM4, with less instances of gimbals having to be reset after losing its position.

The experience is aided by the responsiveness of the smooth-Q3’s button layout. There are rarely any delays when switching between portrait and landscape mode, and there’s plenty of give behind the analog stick, which allows me to pull a slow-pan with minimal effort. A simple tap of the trigger also enables Smooth-Q3’s SmartFollow 3.0 mode.

Similar to DJI’s Active Track feature, you can select a focus point by dragging a finger across the screen of your smartphone. Once a topic is selected, the Smooth-Q3 does a great job of keeping the topic in the frame, even from a great distance. By the way, if you want to activate the feature remotely, you can use gesture control to do this.

Going deeper into the feature set, I find it hard to dispel the notion that Xiyun just saw what DJI was doing and tried to emulate his competitor with mixed success. The Magic Clone Pano, for example, is pretty much just a clonemy pano, allowing you to inject yourself into multiple points in a scene and for ridiculous shots to keep yourself and others in multiple places together.

However, when DJI’s clone worked like a charm, the magic clone was a complete mess in the experiment. However, the ZY Cami app failed to merge images into one non-stop panoramic shot. At one point, it somehow caught nothing but my floating head. Dolly Zoom did a much better job, creating a truly hiccup effect that some people will surely find a kick in.

What DJI doesn’t have is a built-in fill light in its current gimbals. It’s one of those inclusions that makes you wonder why no other company did it anytime soon, as the Smooth-Q3 now makes it incredibly easy to continue shooting top-quality video even in low light scenes. Different levels of brightness are available, which gives you a few options to match the scene you’re in – but it’s not an easy switch to keep flying.

Note that the fill light’s pressure button has no sensitive response, making it very difficult to detect and determine exactly how much pressure is required to turn on the feature – this seems to vary greatly in effort.

Even with all these features on board, I’ve rarely seen myself need to charge a smooth-Q3. Zhiyun claims that Jimbal’s battery lasts up to 15 hours and I noticed that there was a lot of juice left in the tank after several days of filming.

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