DSLR RIG REVIEW

by Sebastian WöberJanuary 23^rd, 2010

First Contact

We really wanted to get all the rigs that are available, so I started to contact the companies in mid-November. Most of them were very pleased to send us their gear for review. Some however couldn’t or refused to send in their stuff.
This is an alphabetical list of all the companies, that offered us their DSLR rigs for review:

GREEN = a company that sent gear for review.
RED = a company that did not send gear for review and the reason for not sending the gear.

• Arri
• Cavision
  “Unfortunately we are currently out of stock of our 5DMII packages”
• Chrosziel
• Cinevate
• The Cine City
  Never replied to my mails
• D|focus
• Dv Tec
• Easom
  (promising, gear looks great, but) not ready for production
  
• Genus
• Half Inch Rails
• Indifocus
  “completely swamped right now with orders”
  
• Magic Spider
• Octopi Films
  Stopped replying to mails
  
• Redrock Micro
• Vibesta
• Vocas
• Zacuto
  “I think you understand, that with Cinevate as a sponsor of your site; the understandable impulse to help a business partner may override other variables in the contest. If I were in a position similar to yours, I would find it very difficult not to be significantly predisposed to giving positive reviews to a sponsor.”…”At this time, Zacuto feels that this contest for our products is a situation with very little upside.”

This is a picture of all the handheld rigs we received. In this review you can click on all pictures to inspect them at a larger scale. As you can see, some companies offer their own follow focus and matte box systems, others only supply shoulder and/or handheld support. We reviewed them as completely as possible, but at the end of the day what interested us the most was what the products say about their companies and which we one we would trust with our hard earned money.

You will see which brands earned our personal trust (which can differ from your opinion of course) at the end of this review, but before we get into the hardcore stuff we want to start from scratch. We’ll start to review every single piece separately, because the details are an important part of the awesomeness that good rigs hold and after all, this is a review. Additionally we have to prove a point somehow.