Lanparte Gimbal for Smartphones and Gopro

AKED

Hi

I recently bought the Lanparte gimbal HHG (present at our deal) .

It is very well made and looks and feels well worth the money.

For a smartphone it works really well. You can balance the smartphone well to a hiorizontal position and then switch the gimbal on and it works great. Smooth flying.

Filmed with the Iphone 6 First time I used the gimbal, so there is room for improvement while handling it. But it is really smooth.

I ordered the gopro case and attached the gopro to it. But when putting a gopro on it you cannot balance it. It has too much weight to the right front, depending on which version of the gopro your use. The Hero 4 silver silver has different balance as the Hero 4 black due to the screen for example. The Hero 3 is different again..

This is a gopro hero 4.

You see it is out of balance. So I attached some weights to balance it otherwise the gimbal has to work too much just to have it horizontal and in balance.

Then I contacted the retailer and told him about the problems. I send some pictures what I did and how I did and he said he would contact Lanparte. A few days later he already got feedback. He has received another load of gimbals which have now an adjustable weight attached.

The old version only had the weight adjustable forward or backwards and now you can also adjusted sidewise. They send me a new gimbal and I can send the old one back. It will arrive tomorrow probably. This is great customer service.

mrbill

Tom Antos gave this a glowing testimonial

dlzn

interesting...

AKED

I do not know what youtube did to the video linked in my first post. On my computer it is very smoooth, also while panning.

ok, the video is 60 fps. Firefox does not support that. If you youse Chrome, it should be better or download the file and pöay it directly, not through the browser.

AKED

I uploaded a 30 fps version to vimeo. It plays smoother there.

Best, if you download the file. Then it really plays very smooth.

Vitaliy_Kiselev

Present at our deals - Check Lanparte gimbal additional details and price..

MikeLinn

mickos

12:20 am. I just received this through PV deals, fired it up for a quick test and it's great! Looking forward to sunrise and a full speed test and posting a full review.

adamquesada

Has anyone tried or will anyone try adapting a GM1 + 14 pancake on this thing :) ? GM1 + 14 pancake should be around 260 grams (0.5 lb), not too far off a gopro.

mickos

Interesting idea - unfortunately I don't have a GM1. But have just shot a quick 10 minutes of my sons kicking the football around on a GoPro 3+ - which will be the basics for a full review - and in short this gimbal works brilliantly with the GoPro running at high speed on flat ground. It didn't seem perfectly balanced before turning it on but it is super smooth once on - not sure whether a heavier load would stress the motors more...go pro 3 is only 74grams, the 4 is 88g.

mickos

I'm loving this gimbal: Here is a quick review
http://sciencefilmsnz.blogspot.com/2015/02/equipment-review-lanparte-3-axis-gopro.html Or straight to the footage...

mickos

Here's my take on the Lanparte.. Having used a Glide cam (a lighter version of Steadicam) for a few years, and very recently a Varavon Birdycam 2 gimbal for my GH4, I didn't think that I would need a motorised gimbal for my go pro. After all when it's flying on a quadcopter it hangs from the quad's 3-axis gimbal and gets stable shots in strong wind, and when I use it in the surf it sits on the floating board or slowly swings under the water. And I've pretty much given up on getting stable running/orienteering shots unless it's in terrain that's close to a road. (Try lugging a glide cam and two Panasonic GH's with lenses, on a 10 hour epic run across the Tararua mountains when rain sets in and they become deadweight and you'll get the picture. Or not get any pictures.). I've also experimented with the GoPro at speed on the trail and it's not at all stable. But it is waterproof so you can get great shots of water drops and mist.

Until now. WOW. It took all of ten minutes chasing my sons around the soccer pitch to convince me that you can get steady footage at high speed. Hold this super lightweight setup as you would a steadicam and it will be good enough for a music video and cinematic chase footage. Especially with the GoPro 4 shooting 4k at 30fps (soon to be 48fps) where you'll have room for stabilisation if you crop in.

Take a look at the 1 minute snippet from the 10 minutes of running around - there is a tiny bit of micro movement in the longer chase section and the horizon is not quite level. It's shot at 2.7k at 30fps and rendered at 24fps HD 1080 with fisheye removal and slight colour correction.

Stepping back from all the excitement of getting this gimbal up and running won't take long. It took a few minutes to add the GoPro mount onto the gimbal and screw the GoPro in; then there was a small balancing weight which seemed to get it roughly balanced. It wasn't as finely balanced as the Birdycam gimbal which holds up to 1 kg, but with 80odd grams of GoPo weight it seems as though a rough balance is good enough.

Once started, there are no refinements or operational modes to choose between - just turn it on, wait a few seconds for the level-up and start running, dollying, trucking etc etc. The default mode is a slow follow so that as you pan or tilt it slowly follows your movement (see video at 17 seconds) making it super easy to pan steadily around your subject. It's so light that if your arm gets at all tired you just swap to the other for a while. Most of all it's fun to use, and brings a new dimension of pleasure to shooting those tricky moves. It remains to be seen whether it will still be fun after 5 hours of running over mountain ridges but I'm guessing it will still be.

Improvements? Obviously waterproofing and a mount for the go pro in it's casing would be fantastic. But seeing as the huge quadcopter market hasn't got a waterproof gimbal yet (everything else is though, from quad to cameras) it may take a while. And adding more weight might detract from the great performance. I'm expecting that irregular terrain may not provide footage as smooth as on the soccer pitch but we'll see in the next review!

Overall a great bit of kit for around $350 USD. Did I mention the word WOW yet?

andyharris

Here's my review of the HHG-01:

After a quick trip to the workshop I've got it working well, certainly to a standard that justifies the asking price. However I did find a number of odd design issues.

In these tests I took the gimbal to higher and higher speeds until it started to lose lock.

I hope people find the tests useful!

andyharris

I've had a few emails, messages and chats with friends about the review and of course more of a chance to use the Gimbal under the conditions that it was meant for. Some say I drove the HHG-01 too hard.

So for the record, given the state of current technology the HHG-01 is well worth the money and functions well.

I have emailed the support at LanParte about getting the software to recognise inverted operation -- hoping for a positive reply!

andyharris

Righto! many excitings, The LanParte dev team have responded to my email by sending me the gyro set-up and calibration software. I can see that it has invert functions for all directions. The software is for PC's so I'll have to do a little messing about to get it to work properly on my Mac using vmware Fusion.

andyharris

More extreme HHG-01 gimbal testing. I did not expect this to work!

mickos

More testing at running speed; still very pleased with the quality of the stabilisation and the grab-and-go convenience factor, in between quad shots/changing batteries

cgbarrett77

The weather here in Northern Indiana has been a little crazy so I haven't been able to get out and get the test footage I want. So for now I wanted to share this short video which is my first time using the Lanparte Gimbal with my gopro hero 3+ black edition. Keep in mind this is my first time using it. I have learned some tricks on how to use the gimbal more effectively and I hope that within the next week I will be able to get some better test footage to share on here. But for now, here is my first test using the Lanparte Gimbal with gopro hero 3+ black edition.

cgbarrett77

Finally got some nicer weather so I was able to go out and shoot some more with the gopro and the Lanparte Gimble. First off, this thing is great. The setup is super easy. Also, this was an extremely windy day and it didn't seem to have much of an effect, if at all, on the lanparte. Very solid and stable, and there were several shots where I was running very fast. This was only my second time using this gimble and I have to say I'm very happy with how smooth this thing is. I can only imagine that the more I use it the better I'll get at getting smooth shots. Also, the battery on this thing is great. You'll probably be switching batteries out of your gopro several times before you even have to thing about recharging the gimle battery. So, super easy setup, very solid and stable, very long battery life. It's every think I hoped it would be and more. It completely exceeded my expectations. Now, I just need to find the sweet spot for render settings for better quality youtube videos, haha. Not happy with youtube compression. If anyone has any tips or secrets on that, let me know. Here is my video.