So recently DJI has released the new Ronin-SC which is aimed at the mirror-less market as it supports smaller lighter cameras than the Ronin-S. The Ronin-SC came with a great set of features some of which are not available on Ronin-S and as you guessed by the title, I am talking about Active Track 3.0 and Force Mobile.
Now naturally all Ronin-S users where expecting this feature to be ported to their new and flagship DJI Gimbal but so far their expectations were not met. As I am a Ronin-S users myself I looked up the DJI forum to see if there where any news about the release of Active Track 3.0 and Force Mobile for the Ronin-S.
Initially I found a post from DJI Mindy that stated the following on the 16th of January 2019:
Hi there, I have got the feedback from our engineer that we will support tracking feature via the future firmware, please note the release notes, thanks for your attention.
DJI Mindy on DJI Forum
Now that seemed good news, yes it was 7 months ago but still it gave us the impression that this development was in the pipeline and would soon be released.
A new thread on the Forum and a reply by DJI-Paul however makes me doubt the initial statement. As many people were upset and complaining on the forum DJI started a new thread with the following first Post:
This was met with a lot of criticism and doubt, many users are worried that DJI Ronin-S will never see the release of these features but instead will move to the Ronin-S2 and force users to either abandon DJI or invest in to the new Gimbal.
Following the negative feedback on this Post DJI-Paul released another reply which basically states that it is very difficult to develop these features in to the Ronin-S and that it takes a lot of scoping, testing and development as well as the re-writing of the Auto-Tune algorithm due to the additional weight and dimensions of the mobile phone on top of the camera.
While this might be a valid excuse for the Active Track 3.0 features, it is not valid for Force Mobile as force mobile doesn’t require you to mount the phone on your camera, you simply hold it and use the 3 axis motion sensors of your phone to control the gimbal.
For now there are a lot of upset DJI Ronin-S users some that bought their Ronin-S only a few days prior to the release of Ronin-SC and paid almost double the price for less functionality and more weight. Personally I shoot on a GH5 so the Ronin-SC would have been enough for me, but there are DSLR shooters with heavy cameras that don’t have the option to move to the Ronin-SC.
All in all, we will have to wait and see how DJI will handle the situation, but with gimbals such as the Zhiyun Crane 2 that include Active tracking I can see a lot of people getting frustrated and switching brands.
Personally I am not desperate for the feature and will stay with my Ronin-S for the foreseeable future although I would love to see the feature on my gimbal.
