A product’s development will go through several phases.First of all is its functionality, as an air condition must cooler air, a voice box must make sound. So a stabilizer must stabilize the footage.
After years of research, the stabilization is the most important problem we need to consider for a stabilizer. On this base, we have reached the second level which is how to improve the product and how to improve the user experience, how to improve details to make users feel the gimbal is a very good product to use. During years of the stabilizer design, we actually added many small designs to our product to bring a better user experience. For example, we creatively added a lock axis on SMOOTH 4’s roll axis to make it can standby after folding. This lock system makes the portability improved a lot and easier to fit in a bag, but we still think the portability has more room to improve, so after the SMOOTH 4 released, we keep thinking about how to make a stabilizer more portable. The first plan comes to our mind is to make a foldable gimbal but there are some flaws with a foldable gimbal. For example, the folding connection part itself is relatively large. Furthermore, it is reduced in size over a unidirectional length after folding, but it actually expands the volume of space, which means it didn’t smaller the size too much. So we were considering if there’s a perfect solution to this problem. Then we think how about just smaller it based on its original product form, to make it small enough so that it needn’t to be folded, then the SMOOTH Q2 came out. It’s only palm size and very compact. From the prospective of product, it is easy to make product large but hard to make it small, because we must smaller each component while ensure its performance. For example, the SMOOTH Q4 though is smaller in its size, but the payload didn’t decrease. On the contrary it improves in its battery run time, because we didn’t use the 18650 lithium battery, but use the 21700 high rate lithium battery. The battery volume isn’t larger than the 18650 battery, but the run time is improved. Besides we also designed a quick-release smartphone holder. With the red latch, you only need to unlock the latch then the holder can be taken down and you can assemble it very easily by plugging it in. Because of its convenient mounting system, you can shoot at any scenarie any time without the hassle of rebalancing the phone. The reason we can make it so small is also because of its all aluminum alloy body. It has a distinct difference from plastic material. Due to the better support provided by metal material. Its rigidity is more than several times of the plastic material, so we can make the size smaller while remain the payload the same as the previous product. Besides from the perspective of a industrial designer, the texture of metal is more delicate and solid. To improve the using experience, we added a soft rubber pad on the grip. In order to provide comfort feeling during long-time using. We’ve tried many proportion designs and adjusted many times during product design. Finally, we decided on the current design, it has a very clear distinction of the operation area and the rubber pad area.
If you are interested in our SMOOTH Q4, welcome to www.zhiyun-tech.com .
