Review: Zhiyhun Cinepeer Weebill 3E Gimbal

The trickiest part of using a gimbal is setting the balance for whatever camera you intend to use. As you may be aware, with modern gimbals, once that has been done, apart from some occasional fine tuning, you shouldn’t need to do that task again – unless you change cameras, or change some aspect of the original camera setup such as deciding to use the flip out LCD (and you balanced with the screen closed), or some other change like a different lens, adding a light or mic and so on.

I have balanced so many gimbals over the years I can just about do it my sleep, but I confess the Zhiyun Cinepeer Weebill 3E was a little more challenging than most as I found the front two levers that controlled the locking of the camera plate and the lateral movement of the plate were difficult to get to – and it was easy to get confused between the two.

Normally I would balance a camera with it “looking away” from me, but because of this situation, I needed to reverse my normal method, and once had worked that out, the balancing was a snap.

Sadly, my Fujifilm X-S10 isn’t supported by the Weebill 3E (my Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro is, but was tasked with another job at the time) so I couldn’t test out all the whizzbang functions. However, being a Zhiyun product, and having tested lots of other Zhiyun gimbals with various cameras, I have no doubt things like the Bluetooth shutter control works perfectly as well as the customizable buttons to control supporting camera’s functions such as aperture control, changing ISO and switching shooting modes.

The menu options are simple to follow to change the modes of the Weebill 3E too – eg switch from POV to Pan Follow to Vortex and so on, turn the camera around to take a selfie with a double trigger tap or re-centre the camera with a triple trigger tap.

If you are a TickTocker, the Weebill 3E supports an orientation change to shoot portrait mode, and to do this is a simple re-jig of the mounting plate and takes but a minute or two – albeit you will have to rebalance the camera.

The Weebill 3E is comfortable to use due to careful attention being taken in ergonomics, compactness and relatively light weight. For longer shooting periods, an add-on “sling” attachment is available as an option, by the way.

At AUD$389 the Weebill 3E is at an excellent price point for what you get, and supports a reasonably wide range of popular cameras from Sony, Nikon, Canon, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Olympus etc. You can see the full compatibility list here.

The full specifications of the Zhiyun Cinepeer Weebill 3E are on the Zhiyun website here.