The ProArt line of creator-oriented devices was a stroke of marketing genius by ASUS, helping separate them from rivals with a line of premium devices. A prime example is the Studiobook 16 OLED H5600 laptop, tempting artists with high performance, a beautiful 16-inch 4K OLED display, and an “ASUS dial” for video or photo editing.

ASUS’s previous ProArt laptops like the StudioBook One were workstation-like creator devices with expensive parts like NVIDIA Quadro 6000 GPUs. With this model, ASUS is focusing more on bang-for-the buck with components like an RTX 3070 GPU and AMD Ryzen 9 eight-core CPU. (The more expensive StudioBook 16 Pro models offer Xeon processors and Quadro GPUs.)

The question is, can a reasonably priced laptop like this keep up with more expensive models or even high-end gaming laptops when it comes to performance? To find out, I got a hold of a well-specced but modestly priced Studiobook 16 OLED model and put it to work on some photo and video editing jobs.

A key feature of all the Studiobook devices is the businesslike looks that are far away from ASUS’s gaming designs. To that end, it has a basic black, square-edged body with the only noticeable design touch being the subtle ProArt logo on top. It has bezels that are reasonably small but not what I’d call thin, and isn’t the lightest or smallest 16-inch laptop out there. Still, with a .77-inch thickness and 5.28 pound heft, it’s relatively compact — especially considering that it offers “military-grade durability” (MIL-STD 810H), according to ASUS.

ASUS has developed an “IceCool Pro” thermal solution that’s supposed to boost airflow by up to 16 percent, while keeping noise levels below 40 dbA in standard cooling mode. It does that through the use of dual 102-blade fans, six heat pipes and multiple ducts.

If you need more punch, you can switch to performance mode which boosts power to 95 watts, or up to 135 watts in “full-speed” mode. Fan noise is still reasonable in performance mode unless you’re doing GPU/CPU intensive chores, but the full-speed setting can get very loud indeed. Still, it could be a handy mode if you’re planning to leave the room while doing a render. Overall, heat and noise are very well managed.

The headline feature on this laptop is the 3,480 x 2,400 16:10 OLED display, the first on a 16-inch laptop, ASUS claims. As you’d expect, it’s sharp, vibrant and beautiful in person — by far the best laptop display I’ve ever seen in terms of fidelity and “wow” factor.

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The panel is factory-calibrated to Pantone and Calman color accuracy, with a delta E of less than two, a fact that I confirmed with my X-Rite i1 Display Pro calibrator. I used it with a $4,000 ASUS mini-LED ProArt monitor and despite the display technology differences, they matched very closely to my eyes, color wise.

The true 10-bit panel offers 100 percent DCI-P3 color coverage, in workstation laptop territory and well beyond rivals like the MacBook Pro (78 percent) and Dell’s XPS 15 (85 percent). Along with the color accuracy, that allows for precise color correction controls in apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Lightroom Classic. The 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio with inky OLED blacks also makes it ideal for content creation, with a side benefit that it’s the best entertainment laptop I’ve ever used.

Given that the display is suitable for color correction, ASUS should have perhaps included a way to easily change the color profile for video editing ( Rec.709, DCI-P3 and so on) or photos (AdobeRGB, sRGB). That could be a handy setting in the Creator Hub, for example, or at least as an .icm profile for Windows Color Management.

You can crank the brightness up to 550 nits in HDR mode, so it conforms to VESA’s DisplayHDR True Black 500 standard for OLED displays — very bright indeed for a laptop display. However, it’s well short of the 1,600 nits peak brightness available on the latest MacBook Pros, which use mini-LED displays. That raises the question of whether OLED or mini-LED is more desirable on a creator laptop, but personally, I’d take the superior OLED blacks over eye-scorching brightness and haloing.

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The other attention-grabbing feature is the ProArt Dial. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it’s a gimmick, as it takes up space and adds complexity. Also, similar control surfaces can look cool but often end up in drawers, never to be used.

This one has a few things in its favor, though. It feels nice thanks to the textured grip, smooth rotation and clicky detents. Mainly, though, it’s just convenient as it’s located directly below the keyboard. In that way, it makes more sense than something like Microsoft’s Surface Dial or an external control surface, as those are usually placed outside easy grabbing distance.

With no apps loaded, you can use the dial to turn up the sound or increase monitor brightness more easily than using the function keys. To make the most of it, though, you really need Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite. With Photoshop open, pressing the dial launches a dedicated pie chart-like menu with “slices” for brush options, layer zoom, and so on. Pressing it again on the brush menu, for instance, opens sub-options for hardness, flow, opacity and more. Premiere and After Effects have similar custom menus.

Steve Dent/Engadget

If the stock menus won’t do, you can go into the ASUS ProArt Creator Hub software. There, you can reprogram the functions the way you’d prefer via drop-down menus. As it stands now, the dial only supports four Adobe apps: Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Lightroom Classic. As someone who uses other apps, particularly DaVinci Resolve, I’m hoping ASUS will add more down the road.

I’ve used control surfaces in the past as part of my former video editor career, but I haven’t been a big fan of them on PCs. However, after trying the ASUS dial with Photoshop and Premiere Pro, I got used to it pretty fast. It was natural to keep one hand on the keyboard and the other on the dial to jog video, swap tools and so on. Before long, it was second nature and sped up my workflow.

Moving to the front of the laptop, the trackpad is smooth, responsive and sports not just two, but three buttons — taking me back to the 2000s when all PC mice had this. The third one adds an extra control that could be useful for 3D or CAD apps, video editing to mark “in” points and so on. It’s also the first laptop touchpad from ASUS that supports styluses using the MPP 1.51 standard, which includes its own. That allows artists to use the touchpad as a precise drawing tablet. I wasn’t able to make use of this functionality myself (I can’t really draw), but it’s nice to have it there.

Steve Dent/Engadget

The keyboard has decent travel and a nice amount of spring back, and offers a separate number pad that’s nice to have. However, the entire keyboard is shifted upwards more than usual and the keys are perhaps a touch small, because the ASUS dial effectively increases the space between the touchpad and keyboard. I got used to it pretty quickly, though, and it was never bothersome.

Port-wise, it’s well-equipped with two fast USB-C 3.2 gen2 10Gbps connections, two USB-A 3.2 gen 2, HDMI 2.1, an audio jack and RJ45 ethernet. The HDMI 2.1 jack is nice, as it allows you to connect, say, a supported TV and get 4K at up to 120 fps. It’s good that one of the USB-C ports supports DisplayPort, because a lot of monitors only work with that standard. However, given that creators often connect tons of gadgets, I would have liked to see an extra USB-A port or two, though.

It’s nice that ASUS incorporated a bleeding edge SD Express card slot that can read data from supported cards at an awesome 985 MB/s. There’s a rather huge problem, though. If you insert an SD UHS II card used by tons of cameras, the StudioBook will only read it at UHS-I speeds — 100 MB/s instead of 300 MB/s. Since no cameras support SD Express yet, I’d rather have seen a standard UHS-II slot. (Hopefully that will change, as Sony, Nikon and Canon are part of the SD Express consortium.)

Steve Dent/Engadget

For sound, ASUS incorporated an audiophile-grade ESS Sabre DAC, promising lower distortion and expanded dynamic range. There are only a pair of speakers rather than four or more like on some recent laptops. However, they’re well above average for a laptop like this, with decent mid-range sound and acceptable bottom end. Other features include a fingerprint reader on the power button along with a top-mounted IR HD webcam with Windows Hello support and a privacy shutter.

Now, let’s talk about performance. The top-end ProArt StudioBook OLED 16 I’m testing uses the RTX 3070 mobile GPU, rather than the top-end RTX 3080. I don’t have a problem with that, as an RTX 3080 wouldn’t speed up creative apps much and adds cost and heat. Everything else is high-end, though. It’s got AMD’s top mobile 8-core Ryzen 5900HX chip, 32GB of RAM, and two terabytes of NVME storage in Raid 0. It currently comes with Windows 10 Pro, but ASUS will offer Windows 11 upgrades early next year.

I ran the ProArt StudioBook through our usual battery of performance tests, including PCMark 10 for productivity, 3DMark’s Time Spy for 3D performance, Atto’s diskbench and others.

It performed near the top in all of them, as shown in the chart above, particularly the disk speeds. With the RAID 0 NVMe storage, disk speeds are stupendously fast, with reads at 5.6 GB/s and writes at 5.35 GB/s. It can’t be overstated how much that helps disk-intensive apps like Premiere Pro.

I also ran tests more geared to content creation, like Maxon's Cinebench R23 and Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve. The PugetBench tests offer decent real-world results, as they automatically loop a series of functions that test effects, encoding, playback and so on. Again, I saw top-notch results compared to other recent creative and gaming laptops.

For instance, it hit 938 on the PugetBench DaVinci Resolve extended overall test, a result that stacked up with many desktop machines. Other scores included a 981 on PugetBench Photoshop 22 CC, compared to 781 for the Dell XPS 15 OLED and 998 for Lenovo’s ThinkPad P15 Gen 2. Like most other laptops, though, it was handily bested by Apple’s M1 Max MacBook Pro, scoring 698 on the PugetBench Premiere Pro Standard test, compared to 821 for the MacBook.

Steve Dent/Engadget

Gaming is not this laptop’s raison d’être, but I did some anyway, and it acquitted itself beautifully with Cyberpunk 2077, Destiny 2 and other titles. Frame rates were decent for 4K laptop gaming, though I needed to knock the detail settings well back. The 4K screen is a limiting factor, of course, because of the 60Hz refresh rate.

Synthetic benchmarks and gaming are fine, but creativity laptops need to prove themselves at work, too. To that end, I edited a camera review video for the laptop using DaVinci Resolve 17.2, and this video on the latest version of Premiere Pro. I also dipped into Photoshop, After Effects and Lightroom.

Again, the ProArt Studiobook acquitted itself with honors, offering fluid 4K editing, even with GPU-intensive camera codecs. I was able to export 4K videos at nearly 300 percent real-time speed in Resolve (NVIDIA encoder, MP4, 4K, 12,000 Kbps max data rate), with color correction, text and other light effects on nearly every shot.

Steve Dent/Engadget

For a desktop-replacement laptop that will often run off wall power, the StudioBook has surprisingly good battery life. It ran for 6 hours and 20 minutes in our 1080p video loop rundown test and even longer for normal browsing and work chores — excellent considering the 4K display. The AMD Ryzen 9 chip’s efficiency likely helps a lot here.

That beats most 4K PC laptops, with the exception of Dell’s XPS 15 OLED model that could go over 9 hours between charges. However, it gets stomped by the $2,500 16-inch MacBook Pro M1 Max, which lasted a ridiculous 16 hours and 34 minutes in our tests. Yes, that model has slightly lower screen resolution, but it lasted over 2.5 times longer.

The StudioBook 16 OLED was relatively quiet during all these chores as well, with the fan only kicking in on complex scenes or exports. Even then, it was considerably quieter than my Gigabyte Aero 15X laptop. If you need maximum rendering performance and don’t need to stay in the room, you can select the “full-speed” setting that cranks the fans to the maximum speed.

Steve Dent/Engadget

In the end, is the ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED laptop worth getting over rival creative models or a comparably equipped gaming laptop? Without a doubt.

It’s not just fast, but smooth and reliable across creative chores — and the “reliable” part is key for production-oriented laptops. It handles 4K editing and large photos without getting overly hot and noisy. It’s not even a bad gaming machine, though the 60Hz 4K screen isn’t ideal for that.

For the cost of the OLED model, you really get a lot. The model I’m working with will run around $3,000, though ASUS still hasn’t nailed down the final pricing yet. It also offers a better spec list than any rival creative laptops unless you’re willing to go way up in price. And don’t forget that the StudioBook has features not found on any laptop, creative or otherwise, like the 16-inch 4K OLED display and ProArt dial.

The MacBook Pro models with the M1 Pro and M1 Max CPUs are making things more interesting for potential creative laptop buyers. They’re much more competitive than the Intel MacBook Pros, as they’re faster, quieter and have longer battery life. However, as Engadget has discovered in testing, the new MacBooks are better than PC laptops like the Studiobook 16 in some ways (battery and video playback) and worse in others (rendering, GPU performance in general). More on that soon in an upcoming Upscaled.

Still, for the money, the ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED is the best Windows 10 content creation laptop you can get right now. I haven’t been excited about too many laptops lately, but I can’t recommend this model enough.

HTC has updated its excellent but expensive Vive Focus 3 business-focused headset with a much larger play area, WiFi 6E and more, the company announced. The software update comes with no change in hardware as HTC "secretly built in the 6E required hardware from Day 1," tweeted HTC's global head of hardware products, Shen Ye. 

WiFi 6E capability brings a "wide range of benefits," according to Vive. That includes low latency and higher bandwidth for VR streaming with less WiFi interference. The wider frequency range also allows double the number of devices with their own dedicated channels. The headsets already had the hardware needed for the standard, "so there's no added cost to the headset owner to leverage this functionality," the company said.

Vive also introduced a feature called Location Based Entertainment (LBE) mode, designed for businesses that use the Focus 3 headset. It increases the size of the play area from a 15m x 15m space (225 square meters or 2,422 square feet) to 33m x 33m (1,089 square meters or 11,722 square feet). That's the size of four tennis courts, compared to a size just under a tennis court, the company noted. 

HTC

On top of the increased area, you can create a boundary in any custom shape like a polygon or L-shape. You'll only need to do that once, as the Focus 3 will "constantly re-localize in the known play area." The new setting is designed to create large spaces for "VR arcade, arena experiences or large training areas," according to HTC. 

The update also includes Map Sharing, a feature that allows accurate co-location tracking among multiple users in a shared space. Other types of headsets that use outside-in tracking (rather than inside-out like the Focus 3), require "users to carry a PCVR backpack and play in a limited space with the Lighthouse system," HTC notes. With the Focus 3, Map Sharing and LBE, "users can finally run around in the field, provide cover for each other in shooting games or share their different perspectives in escape games," HTC said.

Other features include a Visual Odometery (VO) mode that lets you skip the usual 5-minute environment setup, an LBE Hybrid Mode that uses both VO and LBE for 6DoF tracking, and a Space Calibrator that allows accessories like a tennis racket to be more accurately tracked. The updates are now available — for more, check out Vive's blog post.

Sony's PlayStation 5 may not be able to beat the PS4's first year sales record due to an ongoing component shortage, according to Bloomberg. The company has reportedly cut its previous production forecast of 16 million down to 15 million, putting its target of 14.8 million PS5 sales by March in jeopardy, if the report is accurate. It also makes a bad situation worse in terms of consumers being able to pick up a PS5 over the holidays. 

Sony is supposedly having trouble with not just parts supply but shipping logistics as well, according to Bloomberg's sources. The problems are due in part to uneven vaccine rollouts in nations where Sony builds chips, and shortages of essential parts like power chips.

The situation has affected other console makers like Nintendo and even affected the launch of an entirely new console, Valve's Steam Deck — pushing the date back until some time in 2022. It's got to the point that publishers are reportedly saying that sales are gradually shifting over to PC versions of games due to a lack of consoles.

March is still a long ways off, so Sony might still be able to pull off the sales record goal. But it's rather ominous that this report is arriving just ahead of Christmas, so if you're looking for a PS5 as a gift and see an opportunity to get one, better snap it up quick. 

After doing so on mobile, Twitter has stopped automatically cropping images on the web, The Verge has reported. It now leaves full sized images across platforms, after researchers and users discovered that its cropping algorithms tended to be biased based on race and gender. 

If you post, for example, a portrait format photo along with a tweet, it'll now show in its full vertical glory rather than being cropped wherever the algorithm decides. However, Twitter images embedded into a website are still cropped to be more square, as shown below. And if you link a web article with an image, regardless of the aspect ratio or platform, it will automatically be cropped to 16:9. This is one reason many news sites (Engadget included) tweet links to articles with the main (lede) image embedded separately. 

Twitter changed the way it displayed photos following a controversy over automatic cropping. Some users noticed that when presented with a photo that displayed both black and white faces, it tended to automatically crop to the white face. Researchers effectively proved that it had a slight bias toward white people and women, though Twitter decided to phase out cropping shortly before that. 

Cropping was good in one way, in that it can make you click on the image or link to better see what's going on, boosting a website or person's engagement. No one can deny that fewer uncropped images will make for a better experience on Twitter, though. 

Google's Pixelbook Go i5 offers very solid performance and battery life, with the major drawback being that it's pricey for a Chromebook. Now, Amazon is offering the 8GB and 16GB models at the lowest prices we've seen at $749 and $849, respectively — $100 and $150 off the regular prices.

Most of Google's past Pixelbooks offered bleeding edge design and performance at a price of $1,000 or more, at a time when most Chromebook's cost under $100. The company changed that equation with the current Pixelbook Go, a premium yet affordable Chromebook with performance to spare. 

The design is more basic than the sophisticated glass-and-aluminum designs that came before it. While it's around the same weight as the previous Pixelbook, it's considerably thicker and more rounded. It's arguably more practical, though, thanks to the easy-to-grip ridged base and display that you can open with just one hand. 

More importantly, it shines where it counts. In our Engadget review, we noted that the Pixelbook Go delivered good performance and battery life, outshining most Chromebook models out there. That's helped by the Intel Core i5 processor with 8GB or 16GB of RAM, which is more than enough to power Chrome OS. It also comes with an excellent keyboard that offers plenty of travel. 

The only drawbacks are a 1080p display that's not quite as good as the original and a trackpad that isn't the smoothest. Still, for the sale price of $749, the Pixel Go i5 is easily one of the best Chromebooks you can get. 

Yelp seems like it's been on the internet forever, but it still helps millions of people figure out where to eat. Now for the first time, the company is introducing a vertical home feed featuring images of dishes and more, designed to help people discover local restaurants. 

The feed will first and foremost feature "popular dishes and other trending photos from consumers, including food photos or interior and exterior shots of the restaurants," Yelp said. Much like Google and other types of news feeds, the content shown is based on your proximity to the business, the freshness of content and a dish's popularity. 

When you click on a restaurant's dish, you'll be directed to see more photos and reviews of that dish. Yelp uses machine learning to pick out those dishes based on reviews, then pairs them with photos and reviews of the dish. Clicking on other images, like the interior or exterior of a restaurant, will take you to the business page and show you more photos and info.

The other feature, Yelp Connect, is a paid feature for restaurant owners. It allows businesses to share updates with new and existing customers directly to home feed, helping their posts gain visibility (and Yelp more ad revenue, no doubt). Yelp said that it's initial testing showed it may lift a restaurant's consumer engagement up to 30 percent. 

The new experience is arriving today on iOS exclusively in 150 cities in 25 US states, Yelp said. There's no word yet on an Android release, but the company said to "stay tuned for additional updates." 

Roland is again diving into its past with the JX-08 and JD-08 Sound Modules, emulating the vintage analog JX-8P and digital JD-800 synths from the '80s and '90s, respectively. Both reproduce the sounds of those classic synths digitally, while adding new effects and patches tuned for contemporary styles.

Roland's JX-8P came out in 1985 as one of the company's last analog synthesizers. It married analog synthesis with digital control, offering "warm pads, shimmery chorus and crystalline textures into the most popular songs of the era," Roland said. The JX-08 recreates those sounds with new effects and a polyphoric sequencer. 

Roland

It features expanded polyphony, two-part multitimbral capability and dual/split modes, along with 32 presets from the original hardware and over 100 new patches more in line with modern needs. Plus, it's available with a panel derived from the synth's companion PG-800 programmer unit for the original hardware, letting you store creations in 256 preset slots. 

The JD-800, meanwhile, was a digital synth introduced in 1991 with a "control laden panel and aggressively electronic sound palette," according to Roland. The JD-08 recreates that using "the original JD-800 waveforms" and advanced modeling techniques. IT also adds expanded polyphony, a two-part polyphonic sequencer and other modern updates. 

Roland

Both synths are highly portable, can run on USB bus power or batteries, and include a built-in speaker for mobile sound monitoring. They also feature a built-in USB-C audio/MIDI interface to connect to computer production systems, along with a full-sized MIDI I/O. The JX-08 and JD-08 Sound Modules will arrive in the US in January for $400 each.

As promised, Walmart has started doing fully driverless box truck deliveries in partnership with startup Gatik between its own locations on a fixed 7-mile loop, the companies announced. Despite those limitations, the route in Bentonville, Arkansas involves "intersections, traffic lights and merging on dense urban roads," the companies said. It's another shot of good news for the progress of self-driving vehicles after GM's cruise launched its self-driving taxis into testing last week. 

The Gatik trucks are bringing grocery orders from a Walmart fulfilment center (dark store) to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, the host city of the company's headquarters. The route covers the "middle mile" transportation of goods between warehouses and stores. The program effectively got launched following the December 2020 approval by the Arkansas State Highway Commission, and has been driverless since this summer. 

The new service is part of Walmart's transition to a hub-and-spoke model with warehouses or fulfilment centers closer to customers. Doing so means smaller warehouses, so "there is a growing need for doing repeated trips from the fulfilment centers to the pickup points," Gatik CEO Gautam Narang told CNBC. "That's where we come in." 

Walmart isn't the first superstore to go fully driverless, as Kroger teamed up with self-driving startup Nuro for grocery deliveries back in 2018. However, at launch, Nuro's delivery vehicles were tiny microvans, while Walmart and Gatik are using full-sized box trucks. 

Walmart and Gatik are running similar trials around New Orleans with electric box trucks, delivering directly to a customer pickup location. However, those are currently being operated with safety drivers aboard, so the Arkansas trial is the first truly driverless route. "Our deployment in Bentonville is not a one-time demonstration," said Narang. "These are frequent, revenue-generating, daily runs that our trucks are completing safely in a range of conditions on public roads, demonstrating the commercial and technical advantages of fully driverless operations on the middle mile."

Sony has the best in-ear and over-the-ear wireless ANC headphones on the market right now, but it also has some of the best mid-range models. A case in point is the recent WH-XB910N over-ear wireless noise-cancellation models, with features like 30 hours of battery life, effective noise cancellation and tech that can amplify your voice on Zoom calls. They're not exactly cheap at $250, but you can now pick them up via an exclusive Amazon deal for $138 or 45 percent off for today only. 

The WH-XB910 headphones offer sound quality nearly as good as Sony's top-end WH-1000XM4 models, though the noise cancellation isn't quite as effective. If you like your music with some serious bottom end, they offer the "XB" (extra bass) feature that amps up the bass when activated. It also uses DSEE tech to restore detail lost to compression, and supports Sony's 360 Reality surround-sound audio content. 

Sony is also pitching these to the work-from-home crowd, with its Precise Voice Pickup that can amplify your voice on calls. It also offers an ambient sound mode so you can hear what's going on around you, along with on-board controls. On top of the 30-hour battery life, you can gain an additional 4.5 hours with a 10-minute quick charge. 

If you're looking for the best instead, Sony's WH-1000XM4 headphones offer both incredible sound, accurate sound quality and cone-of-silence levels of ANC noise cancellation. That model is still on sale for $248 in black or silver, or $100 off the regular price.

You might already be familiar with DJI's gimbals, but rival Zhiyun actually carries more models — particularly those designed for mirrorless, DSLR and cinema cameras. Now, it has released the three-axis Crane M3 designed for mirrorless cameras, with some interesting new features like a tiny LED light and a built-in screen.

The Crane M3 is about the size of a water bottle and offers tilt, roll and pan axes with locks for each. It works with smartphones and 90 percent of mirrorless cameras, Zhiyun notes. It has a smart new white and black chassis that the company says delivers a better gripping and user experience. It also offers upgraded motors with stronger torque than the original Crane 3. 

A key feature is the quick-release design with different plates that lets you change rapidly between different sized cameras (action and mirrorless, for instance), without the need to rebalance. It also has a quarter-inch adapter so you can connect a professional microphone to an expansion base and run a second cable to the camera. A mic or other accessory can then be attached to a quarter-inch threaded expansion port. Zhiyun is even selling its own shotgun mic in one of the packages, or you can connect other models.

Zhiyun

The most noticeable feature, though, is an 800-lumen 6 watt dual-color LED light. It's designed for "impromptu low-light shooting," Zhiyun notes, with full stepless dimming control and temperature settings via a control wheel. The light is softened with a translucent filter, though it's largely designed for run-and-gun shooting.

Other features include Bluetooth (or USB-C) control of supported cameras and a joystick and wheel to control, roll axis, aperture, shutter and ISO. If you'd rather not set controls using the smartphone app, it also offers a 1.22-inch full-color interactive touchscreen to change mode settings (portrait, vortex and go modes), as well as follow speed. It also shows camera operational status, gimbal connection and battery levels. 

Zhiyun sent me a unit to try out, complete with the expansion plate, so I attached a Panasonic GH5 II. While some functions weren't working (like the camera app), it was one of the easier gimbals to balance that I've tried and it's certainly easy to detach and attach the camera using the quick release plates. The ability to connect a microphone away from the camera is also smart, reducing complexity and rebalancing, though you'd need some accessories to attach a decent-sized microphone. 

Zhiyun

Operation was smooth, with controls well placed for manual operations. The touchscreen was nice, though it's relatively easy to hit it by mistake — I did so once and accidentally changed the language. The lighting feature works great in a pinch, but because of the small size, it casts some harsh shadows. Hopefully all the features I didn't get to try, including app support, will be available soon.  

The Zhiyun Crane M3 is now available to order starting at $369 (£369) for the standard package, $449 (£449) for the combo package with a backpack, cellphone mount and Tripod Plus, or $649 (£649) for the Pro package, including all the above plus the TransMount Shotgun Microphone and TransMount Expansion Base. You can also get customized release plates for specific camera models: ​​Sony α7M3; Sony α7C; Sony α6000; Sony α7S; Sony ZV-E10; Canon M50; Nikon Zfc; Fuji X-S10; Fuji XT-4.