Let’s face, even on your best day (especially before the first coffee) your hand is likely to be a touch shaky. Which means that trying to film something at 50X is going to produce a fair amount of image bounce. Sure you can go out and purchase a tripod, but why do that when you can buy a cool looking rolling robot mount?
The Dolly by iStabilizer is one of the products that you see and you wish you had been smart enough to design it. The Dolly has a relatively simple design (4 rollerblade wheels, a small aluminum base, and a flexible mounting arm), but it is effective for stabilizing you shots and giving you the ability to capture some very cool panning shots. See my video review below.
Features
– There are two ways to mount a camera 1) You can use the pressure mounting bracket – this is a great way to mount your smartphone 2) you can remove the pressure mount and screw the camera onto the flexible mounting arm using the standard tripod socket.
– The wheels can be adjusted and set to a specific angle – this allows you to roll the tripod/dolly on a specific arc for capturing the correct camera pan.
– The dolly rolls both smoothly and silently – no squeaky wheels.
Areas for improvement
– The flexible arm is difficult to position while filming. This is for a variety of reasons 1) it is surprisingly hard to keep the camera level when repositioning the flexible arm. 2) When adjusting the arm it is difficult to reposition it in a smooth motion 3) When rotating the arm you MUST rotate in a clockwise direction or you can accidentally unscrew the arm from the base.
– It is difficult to get the front mounting bolts tight enough. On my unit it seems like the nuts get loose causing the axel to shift.
For sale on Amazon at around $50
Summary
– The Dolly by iStabilizer is a very effective way to stabilize your videos while allowing you to incorporate professional looking pan shots. There are some areas for improvement but the positives certainly outweigh any of the areas that could use a little improvement.
4 1/2 Stars
