A First Glance at the Syrp Pan/Tilt Bracket

I always enjoy a good time-lapse. Making them is a hobby of mine, as I love getting to relax and work at the same time. Leaving your camera stuck on a tripod or Gorillapod doesn't always give you the most dynamic shot I've found. Fortunately, there are ways to add some depth to your time-lapse film without having to lug around several backpacks worth of gear. One such device would be the Syrp Pan/Tilt Bracket.

While I'm still gathering time-lapses for a full review, I figured I would give some first impressions of the device, not having used it enough to know all of it's quirks. Starting off, the packaging is nice. Syrp keeps it simple and sends everything in hard fiberboard boxes. It's not fancy, but it feels better than the boxes any camera or lens comes in. 

When you get the Pan/Tilt Bracket, you'll find yourself with several boxes as the unit has a few pieces. There are two Genie Minis, each in a small circular box. For those that aren't familiar with Syrp's products, the Genie Mini is a small, hockey puck sized time-lapse motor. The Pan/Tilt bracket arrives with two, as one drives the pan and the other drives the tilt. They each arrive with an instruction manual and a charging cable. The other pieces of the unit are the actual brackets themselves. Once you attach one of the Genie Minis to your tripod, the large bracket is attached to the top of it. The second Genie Mini screws onto the top of the large bracket in a sideways orientation. From there, the smaller bracket screws into the second Genie Mini. On the end of the smaller bracket is the area where the camera attaches. A simple 1/4-inch screw sits in the long slit on the camera platform, allowing you to move the camera around to better situate the camera on it's center of gravity.

The arms themselves are metal, not plastic or carbon fiber. They feel solid, but incredibly light. So far, I have no worries about the build quality. As for the Genie Minis, I would say the same. A thick rubber is wrapped around the outside of the Genie Mini giving it a bumper from anything that may hit it. The Genie Mini has a simple interface with a power/Bluetooth connection button, a USB port for charging, and a small 2.5 mm jack to attach the camera connection cable. It seems easy enough, but all of the control happens within the Syrp app.

I was pretty frustrated when I learned that you had to use a phone or tablet to control the Minis, but that was before I found that the app doesn't need to stay open and the phone doesn't need to be connected to the Minis at all once the time-lapse has started. This helps to conserve battery life on your device if you're on long excursions. The app itself has a clean layout, without extraneous buttons or advertisements. You simply select video or time-lapse and whether or not you want to create a custom pan/tilt path or use a preset. It's functional and simple, as an app should be. I did notice, however, that there are some small issues like the app deciding that it needs to flip the camera 320-degrees around clockwise instead of moving the camera up 40-degrees counterclockwise. This has resulted in my lens almost hitting the base of the bracket, which I can't imagine would be good for either my lens mount or the bracket. Hopefully that can be resolved through some firmware as the app already has built-in warning zones so you know where not to tell it to tilt.

Again, I haven't had time to delve into every feature that the Pan/Tilt bracket and app have to offer, but so far I'm impressed. I plan on giving it a real run for its money in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for a full review with video samples.