Steadepod Camera Stabiliser Review

The Steadepod is a small device aimed to help you stabilise the camera for longer exposures. I bought one towards the end of last year, but hadn't given it a test until reasonably recently.

It works by screwing into the thread at the bottom of your camera. You then pull a retractable wire out of the unit that has a piece of plastic attached to end. You put the plastic end under your foot, and move a switch on the Steadepod to lock the wire. Then pull the camera up so the wire is reasonably taut when you take your photo.

The idea is that by putting tension on the wire, it helps to stabilise the camera. Certainly it should remove any up and down motion of the camera anyway. It is an old idea, and people have used string with a washer on the bottom and bolt to screw into the camera on the top for a long time. The Steadepod is just a commercialisation and improvement of this method.

However, I didn't find any advantage of using the Steadepod. Probably if you shoot with the camera held out in front of you, it may provide some benefit. But with the camera pressed against my face and arms in against my body, the Steadepod didn't make any difference.

Here are my other thoughts about the Steadepod:

• The wire doesn't always automatically retract and can be difficult to get back inside the unit's body.

• Standing on the plastic end of the wire, it can get muddy. As a suggested alternative, you could wrap the wire round your belt.

• It doesn't weigh much and is easy to leave attached to the camera without getting in the way.

• If you want to switch between using the camera on a tripod and shooting handheld with the Steadepod, it takes some time. You need to unscrew the QR plate from the camera, then screw in the Steadepod. And vice versa when going from handheld shooting to tripod.

  Carrying a tripod and shooting handheld is something I do quite a lot. It takes me at least a couple of minutes to set the tripod up (usually I will need to remove the pano head and attach a ball head for normal shooting). So this is an issue for me.

  I guess that if you really wanted you could screw it into a QR clamp to make it easy to add and remove from the camera.

In conclusion, the SteadePod didn't help stabilise the camera for me at all, so I won't be using it. If you like to hold your camera out in front of you at arms length, it may be of some benefit. If you want to check, just try the bolt and string method and see if that works. If it does, a SteadePod may be a worthwhile purchase for you. I bought mine from 7dayshop.com, they no longer seem to stock it but you can still buy it from amazon.