Evo SS vs Slick Chest Mounted Gimbals for Mountain Biking | Featuring the Stuntman Chest Mount

What's up guys, Jimmy from Mountain Bike Travel Lead here again today. We are going to do a side-by-side comparison of the Slick Gimbal and the Evo SS Gimbal. Both of these are chest mounted gimbals. Uh, we're here in my mountain bike cubby in my apartment in Boston. We're just going to do a side-by-side review out of the box, some pointers, some positives, some negatives, and then down the road, I'll be making another video of a comparison out there in the field. So let's get to it. All right guys, so first things first we're just going to take a look at what comes with each of the gimbals. You have the Evo S here. Uh, the Evo S is a little more of a complicated setup. When you take it out of the box comes with this monopod tripod here, which actually expands all the way out. You can do some extreme selfies with that bad boy comes with a couple of connector cables. These will connect your GoPro to the gimbal itself. You can charge your GoPro there. A couple of these screws here. You have the gimbal itself, a little sticky pad. We have the chargers here comes with four of these 3.7 volt lithium batteries. Uh, you have your charging cable, which is going to allow you to plug your charger into the wall. You have this little mount here, which actually goes into a tripod mount on the gimbal itself. And that allows you to attach your GoPro accessories. Really nice to have that little tripod attachment there. If you want to attach that way and then you have the sweet little carrying pouch. So that's all nice. Good little setup. Kind of confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, you're good. Now over here on the slick gimbal, a lot simpler, I must say. Uh, basically what you get out of the box is your slick gimbal and then this nifty charger cable, which basically just plugs into the gimbal there. And then this is actually just a normal USB plug, but it looks a little, a little more contemporary there. So when you take them out of the box, you know, definitely a very different experience. The Evo SS here seems to be a little more high tech. It has a lot more going on and then the slick is a lot simpler. So maybe simpler is better, but let's see what else they got to compare. So first things first, let's just talk cash money. The Evo gimbal, uh, is $279 with the soft carrying case included. The slick gimbal is $299 but if you want the carrying case, you can buy this nifty slick carrying case slides right in there, but this is an extra $34.99. So if you want the pull packet, full package and a nice case to carry it in, you're going to be looking at 350 bucks. So right off the bat, the slick is a little more expensive, but let's just run through the basics. So first of all, let's just talk weight. The Evo gimbal is much smaller as you can see. The slick gimbal seems a lot larger and we'll definitely test that out on the chest mount in a minute here, but the Evo gimbal without the batteries is 180 grams while the slick gimbal is 350 grams. So right off the bat, the slick is a lot heavier for me. That's kind of a cautious note. It's going to be a little harder to keep it stable on the chest mount. But we'll get to that later. Now that being said, let's talk batteries. So the Evo gimbal has replaceable batteries. It comes with these four lithium batteries, two go in at a time. They say to run, you know, 4.5 to five hours on one set of batteries and if you're connected to your GoPro and charging your GoPro at the same time, it's going to take an hour and a half to two and a half hours off your batteries. So let's say you're charging your GoPro the whole time. Basically you're going to get about four hours of battery life out of that, but you can buy as many batteries as you want. Now with the slick gimbal, there is actually no way to replace the battery in this. It's a single set battery. So basically they say you get three and a half to four hours. That's all you get unless you can jump off the trail and recharge it. So a big difference there, but both should work. Three to four hours is your average ride. Next up, we have the durability of the device itself. So the slick gimbal here is said to be rainproof and dustproof. So we're assuming that we can go out in this. We don't want to throw it into a pond, but we can ride in the rain. It's not going to seep into any of these joints. So I'm going to hold them to their word on that until I get out there and test it. The Evo gimbal on the other hand is not said to be rainproof or necessarily dustproof. I've heard they're extremely durable, but obviously you don't want to go out in a monsoon or again throw this one in the water. But major difference there, you know, it'd be really nice for this to be a bit more weatherproof, but you know, maybe the other qualities outweigh that. Next up we'll actually look at one cool feature on the Evo SS and that is this little charge cable that comes with the gimbal. So basically how this works is you can take this end plugs right in here, you attach your camera and then you can actually, if you keep the port open, you can keep your GoPro charging while you use it, which is a great feature. That being said, when they send you the gimbal, they send you two of these and these are both actually made, I don't know if you can see, but they're made for the Hero 3 or Hero 4. So you have to go online and pay $15 to get one that will use the USB-C port to work for the Hero 5 and up. Little side note, but you know, as long as you have 15 extra bucks, that'll be taken care of. Now the slick gimbal doesn't have this feature at all. So basically if I attach my Hero 5 Session, what I'm going to have to do is run some sort of an external battery, find a cable flimsy enough to not mess with the gimbal itself while it's in use. Again, just a big headache for the guys that are using the Hero 4 Black, which a lot of people use because of the noise difference. That's fine because you can replace the batteries. But me again, I am using the Hero 5 Session, so I need to find a way to keep this thing charged, no replaceable battery and it dies pretty quickly. So it looks like the Evo SS wins this one. Next up, let's talk about calibration. So one thing that's really cool with the Evo SS is if you need to calibrate your device, basically all you need to do, jump in, open up your Evo app and you can actually connect your camera and do all your calibration right from your phone. It's a really good feature to have. The app can control a ton of things on the device. It just makes life a lot easier, especially when you're as mobile as I am. That being said, the Slick Gimbal is actually harder to find any support for it. If you need to calibrate, you know, I actually was lucky enough. The CEO of the company is really cool and he's put out these YouTube videos, but basically what you have to do is contact him. He will actually help you and then you can watch the videos and follow along. But again, it's just really nice to have that app feature for the Evo Gimbal. Temperature is the next subject. So the Evo SS Gimbal will go from negative 15 degrees Celsius to 50 degrees Celsius. While the Slick Gimbal is said to go from negative 20 degrees Celsius to 60 degrees Celsius. So a little bit more of a range there, but unless you're mountain biking in the Sahara or in Alaska, I think they'll both do just fine in any condition. One cool feature that both of the gimbals have is actually a time-lapse feature. So you can actually set both of these on a tripod and they can run their own time-lapse program. That being said, again, the Evo SS does have the app, which makes life a lot easier while the Slick Gimbal is just basic button controls. Now, both of these gimbals also have multiple modes. So on each gimbal, you can either do a pan mode or a pan and follow mode where the camera will actually move up and down or just maintain a level horizon. So very cool features on both. It's really good to have the flexibility to whether, you know, you're mountain biking like I usually am or someone who's surfing or anything else. So now let's connect our GoPro to our gimbal. We're going to do the Evo SS first. We're just going to slide this right in here, screw our bolt in. Super easy. Now when I connect this to my chest mount, basically what I'm going to do is curve side up here. I do one motor on the bottom and one motor to the left, and that's going to give me what I want. Now, basically all we have to do, hold the gimbal where I want it. There's a little button here, a little gold button. We'll hold that down until it powers on. And there we go. So right now it's in the basic mode where it just maintains a level horizon. It'll follow you back and forth, but it will not follow you up and down. Again, much smaller, pretty nice, simple to use. I think it'll fit very well on the chest, but we'll test that out in a second. So let's see how the slick does. Now we will connect our hero five to the slick gimbal. Again, just your basic bolt. This one's always a little tough to get on. You got to put a little pressure on it. Attach like this. Again, curve side up is how I'm going to mount it on my chest mount. Hold down your power button. This one you don't have to hold in any special way and it knows just where to go. So again, the same mode here where it's going to follow you back and forth, but it's not going to follow you up and down a little bigger. Again, it's a little heavier, a little bigger, a little worried. How that's going to sit on the chest mount, but it definitely works from out of the box. So that's a good start. So now let's check out the chest mount. So for the chest mount, I am using the stunt man chest mount. It has a little more of a plate here. The straps are also a little more resistant. So I like this better honestly than the GoPro mount definitely holds a lot better. We have the Evo SS here connected via the tripod port to the GoPro GoPro accessory port. So we'll power this on again. You just hold the GoPro where you want it to be. Hold down the power button on the side. It'll turn right on and it'll stay right there. Now every gimbal you're going to buy is going to seem a little big. I mean, it's a big object on your chest, especially when you're coming down over rocks and stuff. You always have to be cautious with your riding. You can't be quite as aggressive. That being said, this only weighs 180 grams. It seems pretty light. Honestly, I don't get much bounce. My bolts are a little loose there, so I moved a little, but I don't get too much bounce say super stable. I mean, it's just, it feels nice. You know, it's there. You gotta be careful, but it's definitely a lot lighter. It's really just, it seems like a really good setup. I've rode with this one time. It does work really well, but you know, we'll see how it does compared to the slick, slick gimbal. It's definitely a little different proportioning here. The cool thing about the stunt man is that this piece here, you can actually take it, unscrew it and you can kind of rotate these pivot points around. So what I'm going to do is with the Evo SS, I actually had this hanging down. It seemed a lot better to hang it lower. With the slick, I think I'm going to try it up here. So it's going to be a higher mount since it has this whole battery pack that hangs down. All right, so now we have the slick gimbal mounted. Again, I'm actually running this upside down. Normally the battery pack is on the top, but in the video from the CEO, it's fine. Again, I mounted it higher here, so it sits a little higher on my chest. That way this kind of stays out of the way. Let's power this on. There we go. Don't have to hold anything. Sets right into place. You have two different pan buttons. You can actually control the pan of the camera. So if you want to pan up or down, depending which way you want to look, whereas the Evo gimbal, you actually just hold it in place for a second or two and it'll lock wherever you want it. It depends which feature you like. I definitely like to think the Evo gimbal is easier when you're out there. You don't have to play with the buttons. Now this is definitely heavier. As you can see, even with the stunt man, I'm getting a lot more bounce. I mean you're comparing 380 grams to 180 grams of the Evo. That being said, I don't know how well it will perform out in the woods. So, you know, it could work a lot better. It could be a little more stable, but I'm definitely getting a lot of bounce. I mean, when you're coming off big jumps, this thing is really going to wobble around. So the weight is definitely an issue. Um, but again, we'll have to see how it does in the live performance. All right guys. So that is the basic out of the box comparison on your Evo SS gimbal and your new slick gimbal. Mind you, the slick gimbal has been around for only a few months now. It started about three years ago with a GoFundMe, but they didn't actually put it into production. So a lot of people waited a long time for this. In the meantime, the Evo was already produced and they've been upgrading their devices ever since. That being said, general comparison, the Evo is a lot lighter. It seems more flexible and easier app to use with the slick is a little tougher. It's a lot simpler. There's a lot less parts, but there's no app. Calibration is tough. This is also, you know, the slick is from Europe. So basically if you need to have it replaced, you have to ship back and forth and communicate with someone in China. Whereas the Evo is US made. So if you have any issues, you know, you can really just reach someone close. They can expedite you a shipment, get you a new one, fix any problems. Super easy. From everything I've heard to date from all the riders out there, uh, the Evo SS has really been tried and tested. It's pretty durable. Granted it's not weatherproof so you can't ride with it in the soaking rain out there, but it's a really good device. It's super light, doesn't bounce around as much. The slick gimbal is a little tougher. Yes, it's weatherproof. Um, but as far as I know, you know, no one's really tested the durability. We'll have to see, but it just bounces around a lot cause it's a lot heavier. Can't wait to get out there and test these. Uh, I'm going to do a live video soon of both them in action in the woods. So just keep an eye on my page. Make sure you subscribe, like comment. I want to hear what your guys' feedback is. Have you tried either one? What do you prefer? Thanks guys.