SmallRig Stabilizer Ring Grip for DJI RS Series Gimbals

Marred by a few flaws

Now that I've had a chance to play with this a bit, I've got feedback to share. First of all, the good. This works well once everything is set up. It's also rather lightweight as expected for carbon fiber. Both power and control are transported by wires inside the tubing, so it does not depend on a wireless receiver like some other options. Now for my gripes, listed from most significant to minor nits: ∙ The power input is a female D-tap receptacle, which is designed to be a power output. This caused a practical difficulty finding a longer replacement cable and none was stocked at B&H. There's a good reason for these cables being rare--a cable with a male D-tap on both ends presents a safety issue. If this disconnects from the gimbal end, it leaves a dangling cable with voltage in the exposed male pins which can easily be shorted by contact with a metal object. This differs from a normal male to female D-tap cable where the energized female contacts are more effectively shrouded. Make a habit of connecting the gimbal side of the cable before the battery side and reversing the procedure when removing the cable. ∙ SmallRig is usually very good at threading, but that expertise did not carry over to the large threads. This may smooth out as production goes on, but my early production model did not go together smoothly. 3 of 4 connections had a small amount of binding accompanied by quite a bit of screeching, and the fourth had severe binding despite checking multiple times that it was not cross threading. Once assembled, everything is solid, but I would not recommend this if you expect frequent assembly and disassembly to fit into a case. ∙ For some reason, the dial on the control handle operates in the opposite direction as the one on the gimbal itself. When you move the gimbal between the ring grip and the battery grip, you'll need to go into the gimbal menu and flip the wheel direction. ∙ The feet that fold out are just friction based. There's no latching or detent in the deployed position, so you have to be sure to avoid accidentally bumping them out of position. ∙ There's no mounting location for to put a carrying handle on the top. ∙ As a final nit, the mounting location for the monitor has 3/8" threads with locating pins and 1/4" threads without locating pins. Since many of SmallRig's monitor mounts are 1/4" with locating pins, this should have shipped with a 1/4" to 3/8" adapter. Attaching a SmallRig tilt/swivel monitor mount to the SmallRig ring grip shouldn't be a problem.