Joby Swing Complete Kit verdict
Summary
The Joby Swing is a clever little smartphone slider with very definite limitations. It brings smooth movie-style camera movements to your phone that can be controlled quickly and simply with a few taps on the app. But its tracking movement is modest and it has a pretty plasticky feel. It’s both good and bad at the same time! The Complete Kit version I tested falls down (sometimes literally) with the supplied Joby GorillaPod 3K tripod – it does not have the spread or the rigidity to handle the Swing at full extension. The Regular or Phone Mount kits are better buys.
For
+Easy and light to carry
+(Fairly) simple to set up and use
+Very easy to learn
+Professional-looking camera ‘slides’ and timelapses
Against
-Plasticky build
-Needs meatier support than a GorillaPod
-Somewhat limited movement
-Motor noise audible in video
Creating professional-looking video is not easy. It’s not about having a better camera, but knowing how to use the one you’ve got. A smartphone is a perfectly good video camera even for some professional use – the secret is, if you treat it like a proper video camera it will act like one.
If you don’t take your camera phone seriously and just run or walk about panning and zooming like a newbie, your footage won’t be up to much. Your smartphone video will look much better when shot with a grip, a gimbal or a tripod.
And if you want to raise your game still further, you’ll need to master basic camera movements such as a slow pan and, better still, a sideways ’shift’. You can’t really do these by hand – even the slightest wobble or waver spoils the effect. What you need is a smooth mechanical support or a motorized mount.
Rotational pans, where you turn are pretty easy, even handheld and certainly with a gimbal, many of which can be programmed to do them automatically.
But a lateral pan, or a ’slide’, is much harder. These are great because they show a parallax shift between foreground objects, which move in the frame, and the background. They look much more ‘cinematic’ than regular panning movements.
The traditional way to do this is with a mechanical ‘slider’ where you move the camera sideways along a rail, either by hand or electrically. But these are long, often heavy and awkward to carry around.
Joby’s smartphone solution very original and very clever – and small enough to fit in a jacket pocket.
How it works
The Joby Swing uses a clever folding ‘scissor’ action where the lower half attaches to your tripod at the front and has a pivot at the rear for the top section which holds the phone mount. The pivot is electrically powered and the camera can move both to the left and the right while staying the same distance from your subject. The effect is just like that of a regular slider, but from a much smaller device.
The controls are all in the companion Joby Motion app, which could hardly be simpler to use. You tap + and – buttons on the screen to move the Swing to your chosen start points and end points, then set it on its way to record either a regular video or a timelapse video.
You can change the Swing settings in the app too, notably the duration of the ‘swing’ movement or the settings for the timelapse speed an interval. You can also pinch the screen to set the camera zoom settings, though I’d have preferred to see the fixed lens options for my iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Build and handling
The idea is clever and the Swing works very well, but it does feel somewhat plasticky. With any camera movements, you need to get the base completely level, and while the Swing does have a tiny bubble level in the top, it’s just not precise enough – or even visible enough – so I resorted to a cheap DIY spirit level laid across the top bar of the Swing.
The Swing can be bought on its own, where it just comes with a USB charging cable. There’s also a Swing Phone Mount Kit, which adds a small ball head and a phone clamp if you don’t have these things already. I reviewed the full Swing Complete Kit which adds a Joby GorillaPod 3K tripod, but that’s not the configuration I’d recommend.
I’m not a fan of GorillaPods anyway. They’re OK for quickly bending and bodging a lightweight camera into position, but even the 3K (3kg payload) model isn’t really up to the job here.
The problem is that using the Swing at full extension means you’ve got a potentially quite heavy smartphone at the end of a very long lever, and if the center of gravity goes past the tripod feet, the whole kit will tip up. I could get round this by stretching the GorillaPod’s legs out to near horizontal, but then the weight of the phone at full extension made the GorillaPod’s flexible legs slowly sink downwards on that side, ruining the ’slide’ movement.
In fact, I think the supplied GorillaPod is only good for relatively small movements of around half the Swing’s full travel. If you want to use its full 380mm of travel, you’ll need a bigger tripod with a much wider leg spread and probably a stronger ball head to cope with all that weight leverage at full extension.
I’d recommend the Swing on its own if you already have a ball head and phone clamp, or the Swing Phone Mount Kit if not, but I wouldn’t bother with the Swing Complete Kit.
Quality of results
The Swing creates really nice, smooth camera movements that are in a different league to anything you could achieve handheld – and they also have a very different look to simple ‘rotational’ panning shots.
The only issue for me is the motor noise, which is clearly audible in the phone video. You could replace the audio track with a voiceover or music in your video editor maybe, or try using a shotgun mic while recording, but it’s a shame you have to do either of these things. You’d have thought this was a design no-brainer. After all, if gimbals can be silent, why not this?
Having said that, my other powered slider, a Moza Slypod Pro, makes ten times the noise (it’s also ten times the size), so maybe that’s simply par for the course with powered sliders.
My colleague George Cairns has produced a nice explanatory video and samples in his Joby Swing review for Digital Camera World.
Value for money
The Joby Swing costs $139.95/£128.95
The Joby Swing Phone Mount Kit costs $169.95/£158.95
The Joby Swing Complete Kit costs $199.95/£188.95
I dare say the Swing is complicated and expensive to make – probably – but it doesn’t look or feel as if it should cost this much.
Verdict
I do really like the Swing, but the construction feels a little cheap, and the weight shifts at or near the maximum travel mean you need a heavier duty tripod than the GorillaPod 3K in the Complete Kit, and one with a wider stance.
It’s a smart little gadget, but the 380mm maximum sideways travel is not the only limitation. The motor noise and the balance shifts inherent in its design are limitations you have to work around or accept.