Hi everybody, my name is Jason with MDI and today we are bringing you another gimbal review.
This is the Kame Mini 2, the second generation.
Now it comes in this awesome little traveling case, similar to before, and up here you have
the rods to complete your stand, set up some manuals as well as a return policy warranty
service card, etc.
Here lies the gimbal, your top handle, and then the screws and Allen wrenches you need
to piece everything together.
So without further ado, let's set this up real quick.
Alright now that we got the Kame Mini 2 set up I can give you a little quick tour.
Now this is a tool-less design which is awesome and very welcome.
The only thing that you would actually need is a quarter for the little quarter 20 screw
on the bottom and an Allen wrench to set up the stand, but otherwise carrying around this
you no longer need to.
Alright so the first things first, you'll notice that all these knobs are now tool-less
and design.
You can go ahead and unscrew any adjustments you need, and the cage now comes with a quick
release plate which is awesome because now you can slide the camera back and forth to
make sure that it is balanced.
And having this cage here in the top that used to be a hindrance on the first version,
now you can set it up to the point where when you push your camera right to the edge of
wherever it is that you have it balanced, you now know that it is going to be balanced
every time, therefore making set up a lot faster.
Now the same thing also applies from the first version.
You have these four batteries instead of one big lipo battery block and of course goes
in the exact same way.
You unscrew these portions.
One has a spring tip and one doesn't.
The one that has the spring end, you're going to want the flat side to have in contact with
it.
So have the flat side facing out, screw that back on, and then on the other side have the
flat side facing in where the power button will be.
There you have it.
Alright so a quick look at how you can balance this gimbal.
Basically from up here we got the yaw bar adjustment and the thumb screw back here allows you
to adjust the roll for the gimbal.
Now what's really neat is these two knobs up here, depending on how you twist them you
can actually move this bottom part of the cage up and down, which is awesome.
You just need to make sure you loosen these little screws a little bit because they do
lock it in place.
And then the last part is of course is having a quick release slider plate that allows you
to move the camera forwards and backwards.
Alright so after you're done balancing your camera onto the K-mini 2 you just got to give
it a little test.
So tilt it off to the side, stays, stays, up and down, stays, and stays.
Alright so first things off the bat after putting this together there's just two things
and one of them is about to be fixed is the stand is a little bit short on the top rails
because if you take a look here to the side you'll notice that the control box here pretty
much is really really close so they're going to be fixing back here real soon.
Another thing that we noticed when we were balancing it with the A7S was that the A7S
had a tendency to rotate on the quick release plate.
Now we suspect it's because the screw was just a little bit longer than it needs to
be so it's probably just a bad batch but just something worth mentioning.
Alright so once you've turned it on we can go through the profiles real quick.
Profile one allows you to follow left and right, up and down.
Profile two, follow left and right but it does not follow up and down.
Profile three is completely locked off no matter what you do.
We didn't load a profile four but we go to profile five for inverted mode.
Hand over the top closest to the remote, one, two, three, four, five.
It goes limp and there we go we are now in inverted mode.
Alright so let's give this a spin and we'll show you some test footage.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've
got here.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here.
Let's see what we've got here, let's see what we've got here.
Okay, as you see the footage wasn't too bad but I want to say that we didn't really go
in and fine tune the profiles a little bit so it could probably smooth out just a smidge
but otherwise straight out of the box it's actually not that bad.
The inverted mode is definitely something that I think a lot of people will gravitate
to because it does a really good job when it's operating in inverted mode.
That being said the K-mini 2 comes in at about $1,000 and the fact that it's a toolless
design is very welcome because it just seems like if you have to use a tool set to set
up a gimbal these days it's pretty much dismissed off the bat.
This having a toolless design, one that definitely works very well is great.
Like I said again, this top bar here if you have it set to a specific lens then all you
really need to do is attach your camera, have it hit exactly where it needs to be up against
this plate and then you're pretty much set all the time.
Now again this is a smaller gimbal which means the motors aren't as strong as the bigger
ones, so you're again still not going to be able to use very heavy lenses, you're probably
going to be confined to these mirrorless lenses that are generally smaller.
And again you do have this round part on the top cage so if your lens exceeds that part
you're probably going to have to either balance your gimbal without the top cage or you just
simply have to use smaller lenses.
And then lastly I would say if you're a mirrorless shooter with a GH4 or an A7 series or black
magic pocket cinema camera then this is definitely something that you can consider if you need
something just to get some steadier shots.
Check out how awesome the stabilizer works.
It's nice right where it needs to be.
