man, this is something i'm really drooling over. Many have reported it's the best follow focus below arri It's probably gonna be my next purchase but I've been spending so much lately, shoulder rigs, monitors, 1800$ laptop...(and I have no job:) ) and now I want to buy the samyang 35mm 1.4 and some LED lights. I guess it'll have to wait a bit :(
I bought the T2 based on what I read on the other website. Extremely fast shipping-ordered on 5/11 and received it the morning of 5/14. Anyway I have used it for a couple of days now and I find that it works superbly well. I am totally pleased. Couldn't be happier. Any communication that I had with John Lee (owner?) was answered promptly and all questions were answered thoroughly to my satisfaction. No complaints from me.
I recently received a TrusMT T2 Follow Focus and have been trying it out on a compact Gini rig with a Nikon-mount Tokina 20-35mm f2.8 zoom. The Tokina's manual-focus clutch ring and fixed-length outer lens barrel work quite well with the TrusMT. Here are my observations:
1. The Follow Focus comes with a second gear, allowing you to have identical gears mounted on both ends of the gear shaft at the same time. This makes it more flexible in accommodating both long and short lenses.
2. The Follow Focus knob can be mounted on either side of the 15mm rails, and rotates in the same direction regardless. I like mine mounted on the right side of the lens.
3. The two focus-stop screws are quick to adjust and work very well. Even when you want to use the full focus range, the focus-stops prevent the gears from binding when you hit the rotation limits of the focus ring.
4. The four plastic focus ring gears work well, but they each fit only a limited range of lens diameters. I'm glad I bought an extra set of four ring-gears along with the Follow Focus, otherwise I'd have to swap the ring-gears between similarly sized prime lenses.
5. The magnet that holds the white witness-mark ring on the knob is weak and the ring can be inadvertantly knocked off.
6. The weakest point of the design is the single thumbscrew that clamps down the double-jointed lever arm the knob is mounted on. While it's precisely machined, there's inevitably a slight difference in the pressure the thumbscrew applies to the two joints. As a result, the knob can be pulled away from the lens no matter how hard you tighten the thumbscrew. To fix this problem, I put thin lock washers in the joints of the lever arm - there was just enough room to make them fit.
After fixing the lever arm problem, I find the TrusMT works very well in practice. The adjustable focus-stop screws are an invaluable feature that makes it well worth the reasonable price.
Thing initially feels like it is really well made. Almost all is from Alu.
All weak and strong points indicated by LPowell (and other owners) are present.
About focus stop screws - it is just bad desing. They work, of course. But hit is hard with sound made from it. Unusable on manual lense with long throw (if you need 360 degrees or more). Not so easy to remove (and easy to lost them in this case). Hope they'll be improved. UPDATE: Company is working on it.
On my unit nor I can remove installed gear, nor install other on other side (because of cheaply made gears and amazing force required to install, so I think that I'll break whole thing). It is not because FF design, but because of plastic gears. UPDATE: Managed to remove gear After first time it is much more easy to remove or install.
Initial impressions: Good FF made by company who don't always check their products properly. UPDATE: currently shipped T2 units have some fixes.
Chinese companies seems to be keen on larger numbers, but I don't know for sure. Vitaliy seems to already be in contact with them for the matte box, will have to see how it goes. I think the new model is in response to the onslaught of $ 160 follow focus. Just before that they were the best price performance ratio. Now they have to differentiate them-self a bit more to expected price arround twice that of the lower end models.