When the Shark Slider Nano II was introduced in October, I ordered it the day it launched (which was a few days later than they advertised by the way). What sold me was the compact size of the shorter model which fits in a standard suitcase plus the fact that it is compatible all the way back to my DJI Ronin RS2 gimbal, which was a pleasant surprise. There were a bunch of YouTube reviews of pre-production units at the time, but they were all in-studio (aka bedroom) reviews, with no real-world testing. I just returned from an 8-day shoot in Belize where I put this slider to work, shooting with it every day, and jumping back and forth between my gimbal on the slider and using my gimbal handheld as I usually do.

Overall I was pleased with the performance of the slider. The built quality is quite good, the movement is very smooth, and it’s easy to set up and use. I was able to power it with a portable battery all day which made it easy to move around. Using it really complements my handheld gimbal shots by giving me rock-solid slow dolly/pan/tilt shots that I just can’t pull off handheld even on the gimbal shooting 60fps and conforming to 24p in post.

There were a couple of issues I ran into. First, forget about mounting it to a single tripod: with the weight of the gimbal and the camera (I was using a Sony A7SIII with a 16-35mm lens) you will get some tilt as the camera moves from one end to the other. For the type of shoots I needed, placing it on a few apple boxes worked perfectly. You just dial in the adjustable feet on one end to get a solid unshakable footing, then brace the apple boxes while the slide is in progress to avoid any shake due the the boxes themselves perhaps being uneven or on an uneven surface.

The other issue was the software – while it’s quite easy to set each waypoint (you can set up to 8 of them but I never needed more than 2), sometimes it just wouldn’t respond when I try to send the camera back to the starting waypoint. Multiple times I had to restart the slider to make it work correctly. Also, I never got the “push pan” feature to work as advertised, but it was easy to simply use the toggle to set my waypoint pan and tilt values.

Full review with lots of examples in the video above. Would love to know your thoughts.