JOBY Swing Review

iPhone photography and cinematography is an enormous ever evolving culture within itself. Accessories come along in their hundreds and unfortunately many are met with a hesitant gaze, this due mainly from experiences with poorly built and designed choices endured by iPhone camera enthusiasts from fluffy marketing that doesn’t quite deliver. Thankfully, the electronic motorised JOBY Swing isn’t one of these accessories and adds worthwhile creative panning options that make it actually useful. Buy on Amazon

Design

With the complete kit (£188.95), it utilises the excellent JOBY GorillaPod 3K stand out of the box, and this is a good start as this stand not only stays assuredly rigid on varied grounds, thanks to its balled feet, but can also be manipulated around objects such as tree branches. If you want further options, the Swing uses a standard tripod mount and so it can be screwed onto anything with such a connector. As a piece of kit, it’s well made. The plastics are rugged and the GorillaPods, from experience, are assuredly versatile. This is an accessory we’d not be at all reluctant to throw in a kit bag or backpack.

The adjustable GripTight ONE phone mount tripod bracket, which holds your smartphone in place, can accommodate smaller offerings like the iPhone 12 or 13 mini, up to behemoth sized smartphones such as the iPhone 12 & 13 Pro Max. Furthermore, the BallHead 1K, to which the bracket attaches, allows for complete control in orientation; portrait to landscape or anywhere in between for a unique perspective. It charges via USB-C and the battery is rated to last for 3hrs.

In Use

The App Store will be your first point of call, in order to retrieve the JOBY Motion App which will connect to the JOBY Swing and is the sole method for controlling it, as the device itself has no controls other than a lock and power button. Upon setting up, we needed to update the system firmware and go through a tutorial, but thankfully, after this is done, repeated sessions using the Swing are smooth sailing. We were particularly impressed to see an instant Bluetooth connection established every time between our iPhone and the Swing.

Thanks to the JOBY Motion App, it’s really easy to set start and end points for video and time-lapses. Holding down left or right on the screen will pivot the JOBY Swing into position for us to set where we’d like the start and end points to be. Then we can press play and it will fully automate the sliding and capturing of the recording.

Using the iPhone 13 Pro wide or ultra wide angle lenses, the footage is basically silky smooth and the same can be said when creating time-lapses. The latter really benefits from the added focal perspective and is particularly more interesting outdoors with urban and rural landscapes. Now, one thing we noticed after reviewing video taken using the telephoto lens, is that the JOBY Swing does exhibit very mild trembling as it moves; although this is not really noticeable with time-lapse films using the telephoto lens. This can easily be corrected in post editing with stabilisation applied, but does show that the motor's vibrations are not entirely suppressed by a design that truly attempts to do just that. The JOBY Swing comes with its own artistic style in the slow nature in which it moves. There are speed settings for even slower options, and the total length of time given to the video from such settings is calculated within the App; an indispensable feature. Yet we can’t help but itch for more creativity options in terms of adjustable speed settings, as the baseline fastest speed is certainly not like a typical camera slider - that used for B-roll video, for instance. A faster pan is, of course, achievable by speeding up the footage later on whilst editing, but to be able to get this natively without a large file size would have been nice and a time saver.

Verdict

The JOBY Swing delivered on its strict agenda of being a well made motorised electronic slider, and with the inclusion of the GorillaPod tripod (can additionally be used by itself) we have a setup for capturing steady videos and movement driven time-lapses both with our wide & ultra wide smartphone lenses. Whether it be a sunset from the perspective of a tree branch, or a panorama of an expansive view from ground level, the JOBY Swing makes these things possible with relative ease due to it being controlled by the App through which it takes in the content. It’s not perfect, though; when using our telephoto lens it exhibits that the Swing does vibrate ever so slightly, and this is more notable when the kit is taken outdoors onto more varied terrains. It would also be nice to have faster pan speed options in future. Buy on Amazon