By Max Duncan and site editor Dan Chung:
Some Chinese manufacturers have a reputation for making near-identical copycat designs of established products. That certainly isn’t the case with the latest brushless gimbal from Filmpower, which Newsshooter has just filmed at the BIRTV show in Beijing. Filmpower surprised us last year by bringing the first mass market pistolgrip-style gimbal for a7S and GH4 cameras to market. This year they have another innovative design.
The new Nebula 4200 is a brushless gimbal which Filmpower with dual mechanical stabilising arms that hold up the main part of the gimbal. These look like mini Steadicam arms and the idea is that they help smooth out vertical movements when you walk or run along. Other makers have used arms like this in their designs, but this is the smallest setup so far to have this type of stabilisation. How well it works remains to be seen. We assume that being so small the Nebula 4200 won’t have the same level of stabilisation as bigger setups when used in moving vehicles on bumpy roads, but for walking along it might be enough.
The 4200 features tool-less adjustment (a godsend compared to the Nebula 4000 that requires a lot of screws to be adjusted). The gimbal is designed to support cameras of up to 1.6 kilograms and this should be enough for a 5D, or an a7S or GH4 with a mid-sized lens. The controllers are 32-bit.
The unit we saw at BIRTV was pre-production and we were unable to test it for ourselves. We hope to be able to do so soon.
To see more from Filmpower you can visit their webstore.
