Pico Flex Table Dolly Review
Since we have been spending some time on video projects we are going to have some reviews of some DSLR video related products. In this article we are going to look at the Pico Flex Table Dolly. A table dolly is a small rig that you mount your video camera to in order to get smooth pan shots or nice curved shots around a product. Although it is fairly easy to build your own DIY camera dolly, I decided to take a look at the Pico Flex dolly because the price point is so low that its fairly hard to justify building one yourself when you factor in the hard costs as well as your time to source all the parts and assemble one.
The Pico Flex is the smallest commercially available table dolly on the market made with a custom designed carriage and axle brackets while riding on high-end roller bearing roller blade wheels. While this design may seem like a low-end approach at first, since a dolly needs to have wheels, you might as well use something that is already available and will function well.
You will need some way to mount your camera to the rig with either a fluid mount or some other type of mount. For general use, I mounted a Trek-Tech MagMount Pro ballhead. The advantage to using the Trek-Tech MagMount ballhead is that because it is very small, it helps keep the center of gravity as low as possible. Keeping the center of gravity low will help keep the entire system balanced well and help keep it from tipping over.
The only thing that would really make the Pico Flex any better would be a print on the chassis and a line on the axles to help you set the axle angles to specific angles if you want to easily be able to replicate a specific camera move.
Using the Pico Dolly with a larger DSLR like a Canon EOS 7D is a little bit of a challenge in getting the balance good. What I really like is using a smaller camera like the NEX 5n which has so little weight that using different angles on the camera doesn’t create any balance issues. While I don’t often have a use for a small dolly, I am hoping to find more uses for it in the near future for use with product reviews. Here is quick video demonstrating some typical camera shots you can do with a table dolly.
The Pico Flex Dolly has a list price of $74.99 but can usually be found on Amazon for about $69.00.
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