The Best Gimbal For Nikon D5500 Cameras!

We have seen so many people reaching out about the best gimbal for Nikon d5500 cameras over the last few month and we finally have some free time available so we have decided to publish our ultimate guide for the top three gimbal stabilizers that we feel are suitable for use with your Nikon d5500. Now, there are an absolute ton of gimbals out there right now that each have their own little quirks.

That said, we have specifically chosen these three due to them being the best option for each of the specific niches of use with the d55000 that we will cover later in the article. Although the Nikon d5500 camera body comes in at almost example one pound of weight, the actual camera rigs with all the accessories mounted to the camera can end up getting pretty weight. We have tried to cover all popular setups so you will definatley be able to find a gimbal to meet your situation in our article.

Additionally, our comparison table below offers a quick and easy over view for the three main gimbals that we have decided to feature in the post. Just below the table, we have a very short overview for each gimbal and then below that, we have a full in-depth breakdown for each handheld gimbal. We just feel that doing it this way helps meet the needs of our readers who are short on time as well as those who have plenty of free time and want to read as much as possible about the gimbals.

Comparison Table

Last update on 2022-05-29 / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

All three of the featured gimbals have specific situations where we feel that they can be considered the best candidate with the overall winner and our primary gimbal recommendation for your Nikon d5500 being the DJI Ronin S. It is without a doubt on of, if not the most popular gimbal at the time of writing and it just keeps on going from strength to strength as time goes by.

The Ronin S is a very versatile gimbal unit and can be used in pretty much any situation that you find yourself in during your videography sessions. Due to its versatility, we feel that it is probably going to be the best overall choice for our readers as you can use it for so many things.

The second gimbal is our budget option. the Zhiyun Crane Plus that is a great little gimbal with a small price tag making it very budget-friendly. That said though, it also has the lowest load capacity of all three gimbals meaning that you will have to ensure that your camera setup comes in under the load capacity of the gimbal.

The final gimbal is our heavy lifter, the Moza Air 2 that has the larges load capacity of all of the featured gimbals. In all honesty though, as the Nikon d5500 is such a lightweight DSLR camera, we doubt that you will need a heavy lifting gimbal. Even with a camera cage and a battery grip mounted to your d5500, we are confident that the DJI Ronin S will be able to provide all the load capacity that you could ever want.

The DJI Ronin S

The DJI Ronin S is what we consider the ultimate DSLR camera gimbal as it just has so much going for it. It has excellent performance, a great design, a ton of versatility, and one of the best build qualities going. This has ensured that the Ronin S establish itself as the top gimbal and it has managed to earn a large number of loyal users who love it.

As time goes on the Ronin S just seems to get stronger too. The majority of other gimbal brands have tried their best to knock it off the top spot and to date, every single one of them has failed miserably. One thing that we would also like to quickly mention is that the Ronin S is a great option to help future proof yourself against a heavier DSLR camera that you may purchase in the future. It is a great bit of kit that works with the vast majority of setups out there so if you do upgrade your camera in the future, it is very likely that the Ronin S will work with it.

Performance And Functionality

As we mentioned, your Nikon d5500 has a weight of almost exactly one pound without any accessories on it at all. With the Ronin S having a maximum load capacity of 7.94 pounds, this leaves around 6.94 pounds of free load capacity for any accessories that you want to use with your camera while recording. You will be pretty hard-pressed to come up with a standard setup that comes anywhere near this unless you are using a battery grip or planning to use a camera cage on your d5500 while recording.

Thankfully, there have been a fair few of advancements in battery technology over the last five years or so and this has lead to a massive jump in the battery life that modern gimbals are able to provide you. The Ronin S can provide around twelve hours of battery life before it needs to recharge and when you do have to charge it, you can take it back to full in just over two hours while plugged into a mains socket.

We would imagine that twelve hours between charges will be enough for most of our readers but on the off-chance, you know that you will need a longer battery life, there is a workaround. The modern power banks that have been designed for use with laptops can usually recharge your Ronin S while you are out and about away from a regular power outlet allowing you to recharge the gimbal on the go.

As our regular readers will know, we always try to share some example footage for the gimbals that we recommend so that you can see exactly what the product can offer you. With the DJI Ronin S being such a popular gimbal, there is a fair amount of sample cinematic video footage that has been recorded using the 3 axis gimbal stabilizer.

We feel the video footage above is one of the best ones and that it does a great job of showing off exactly what you are able to expect from the handheld gimbal during your videography sessions. Although the footage was not recorded using a Nikon d5500, it does give a great example of just how smooth and stable your footage can be.

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User Interface And Control System

Although the user interface for the gimbal shown in the image above may not seem like it is much to write home about, it does serve a functional purpose and has been designed to be as basic as possible for a reason. Most of the popular gimbal brands such as DJI and Zhiyun tend to prefer this type of design for the exact same reason.

Although this control system looks basic, coupled with the smartphone app, it offers everything that a professional level videographer doing high ticket paid client work could ever want out of a gimbal. Additionally, on the flip side of this, it is also very easy to use so anyone who is looking at the Ronin S as their very first gimbal can get it working with ease and get some great footage while they learn.

The DJI Smartphone App

You can see the DJI app in the image above and it supports a fair few DJI devices now too, not just the Ronin S. We feel that DJI has hit the nail on the head when it comes to the smartphone app/physical control system combo and both compliment each other very well when done right.

That said though after DJI initially displayed how efficient this system could be, many other gimbal brands have tried to rip this system off and in our opinion, all but one have failed and made a mess of it. The Moza set up does work pretty well but it is not as good as the DJI one but these two definatley lead the way leaving the smartphone apps from the other brands for dust.

Build Quality And Design

As we mentioned at the start of this section, the design of the Ronin S is second to none and as you would expect with DJI, their design team really took the time to design an excellent product. You can tell that the design team actually worked with their engineers to ensure everything would work together rather than just give the plans to their engineering team and tell them to build it.

Although the Ronin S is pretty large, it is about average size for a DSLR camera gimbal that offers you a maximum load capacity of over seven pounds with a battery life of around twelve hours. On the flip side of this though, although it is large, it is surprisingly lightweight while also being surprisingly robust for how little the gimbal weighs.

The design team at DJI have also ensured that the grip on the handle of the Ronin S is very comfortable to hold and that with the comfortable handle and the lightweight, you can easily hold it for long periods of time without having problems.

Our Verdict

As we mentioned at the start of this section, the has one of the best reputations going within the community and we can totally see why and we agree that this is one of the best gimbals available. It has everything that you could ever want from a handheld gimbal to ensure that you capture the very best video quality possible and will make a great addition to your Nikon d5500 camera accessories.

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The Zhiyun Crane Plus

Our budget-friendly gimbal option for the Nikon d5500 is the Zhiyun Crane Plus and like we said at the start of the article, you have to be sure that this is the gimbal for you before purchasing it! If you are planning to upgrade your camera to a better DSLR in a few years then chances are, the DJI Ronin S is the better option as it will likely support the payload of your new camera too.

Although the Crane Plus is a great gimbal, it does have a lower price tag and with a lower price tag comes a lower maximum load capacity, meaning that if you do upgrade from your Nikon d5500 it may not support the weight of your new camera. Additionally, although we would imagine most d5500 setups would be fine, you do have to double-check the weight of the accessories that you use to ensure that your setup is under the 5.5 pound maximum load capacity of the Crane Plus.

Performance And Functionality

As we just mentioned, the Crane Plus comes in with a load capacity of 5.5 pounds leaving around 4.5 pounds for accessories. Although this may seem like plenty, your camera accessories can quickly start to take it up if you aren’t careful. Anyway, the Crane Plus has the best battery life of all of our featured gimbals coming in with up to eighteen hours of battery for each full charge of the gimbals batteries!

This is absolutely outstanding and is almost a third more than most other modern gimbals at the time of writing. Just like the Ronin S, the Crane Plus can also be charged by some higher-capacity power banks while you are on the go too. Zhiyun really have built on all of their experience to knock out a solid little gimbal with some great performance and it is not surprising that the Crane Plus has the excellent reputation it has with the community.

Just like the Ronin S, the Crane Plus has tons of potential and we feel that the video above shows of just what this cheap handheld gimbal stabilizer is able to provide you. The footage is flawless with the image stabilization that the 3 axis gimbal design provides the camera easily supporting its weight. That said though, the footage was recorded on a Sony a6300 rather than the Nikon d5500 and the a6300 is around fifteen percent lighter than the d5500.

As we said though, provided that you keep the overall weight of your d5500 down below the load capacity of the Crane Plus, we are confident that you will get some excellent image stabilization out of the camera gimbal too.

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User Interface And Control System

Zhiyun have stuck with their regular control system the same that DJI did above and as we covered in the section for the Ronin S, this ensures that both entry-level and professional level gimbal users are able to use the Crane Plus with ease and get everything they could ever want out of it. The user interface is simple to use and you are able to get the gimbal working with minimal effort required.

If you are looking to pick up your first gimbal and you are a little nervous about having to learn a new bit of kit, both the DJI and Zhiyun featured gimbals are very straight forward and easy to learn and there isn’t anything to worry about.

The Zhiyun Smartphone App

As we touched upon under the Ronin S section, Zhiyun has tried to duplicate the ease of use that the DJI Ronin S offers its users due to the excellent DJI smartphone app. Although the Zhiyun app is slowly getting there, it does still have some work that needs doing before it is able to compete with the performance of the DJI or Moza apps.

We really don’t know what the issue is with the Zhiyun app, our best guess would be that they initially outsourced the development of the app to a bad company who made a mess of it. Since then though they do seem to be steadily working towards getting everything fixed and making their app a core gimbal accessory.

Build Quality And Design

The Crane Plus is based around the standard modern 3 axis gimbal design that the majority of handheld electronic gimbals use these days. Although it was predominately designed for use with the lightweight mirrorless camera gimbal range, we have seen that people worry about the range of motion of the gimbal with the larger DSLR camera bodies like your Nikon d5500. Thankfully, this is not an issue and there are plenty of videos online from people going over the gimbal and using it with DSLR cameras and confirming that you can get a full range of motion.

The build quality of the Crane Plus is solid and it is pretty lightweight too. The handle on it is not as comfortable as the one on the Ronin S in our opinion but we have seen a number of people say the opposite and say they prefer the Crane Plus. We guess it is just down to personal preference and if you aren’t planning on having to hold the gimbal for hours at a time it doesn’t really matter that much anyway.

Our Verdict

Like we said, the Crane Plus is an excellent budget gimbal for Nikon d5500 that can definatley get the job done provided you keep the payload of your camera setup within the limits of the 5.5 maximum load capacity of the gimbal. Keep in mind what we said about future-proofing too, if you think you will be purchasing a heavier DSLR camera in the next few years then the DJI Ronin S is probably the better option to save you having to purchase another gimbal when the time comes.

Additionally, we also have this full review of the Crane Plus that goes into more detail on the gimbal and goes over more of the gimbal modes that it supports too.

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The Moza Air 2

We are just going to be brushing over the Moza Air 2 as quickly as possible as we know that most of our readers will never need over eight pounds of load capacity so very few people will actually purchase the Air 2 for their Nikon d5500 anyway. Although we will be going over the gimbal as quickly as possible, you can check out these independent, third-party reviews of the air 2 if you want a more in-depth look.

Performance And Functionality

Like we said, the Air 2 can support the heaviest of Nikon d5500 setups with its nine pounds of load capacity meaning if you do prefer to house your d5500 in a camera cage during use and mount a battery grip to it along with heavy lenses this could be the gimbal for you. The Air 2 can also provide you with up to sixteen hours of battery life per set of charged batteries ensuring that you are able to get all the video footage that you could ever need out of your gimbal too.

The cinematic video abov was recorded using the Moza Air 2 and shows the image quality that you can xpect from the gimbal when using it with your Nikon d5500. If you do use a heavy setup when recording, the large load capacity of the gimbal ensures that it is easily able to provide you with the image stabilization you need.

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User Interface And Control System

Although the control system on the Moza Air 2 looks a little different to the ones on the two gimbals above, it does operate on the exact same principle. To be honest, we actually prefer the more deliberate joystick like the one on the Air 2 as it is easier to know that you are actually doing something with it when you apply pressure.

The Moza Smartphone App

As we mentioned earlier, although Moza are behind DJI when it comes to their smartphone app, in our opinion, they are still well ahead of the other gimbal brands including Zhiyun. Their app works very well and can provide some excellent wireless remote control functionality for your gimbal too as well as the ability to quickly and easily tweak your settings.

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Build Quality And Design

The Air 2 follows the same design principals as the DJI and Zhiyun featured gimbals too but it does have a few subtle differences when it comes to its build quality. This is due to the Air 2 actually being from the older generation of Moza gimbals as the Moza Air 3 is out now but it is more of a budget Ronin S than a heavy lifting gimbal like the Air 2. Anyway, the Air 2 does use some older alloys and plastics but they are still very robust and pretty lightweight in our opinion.

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Our Verdict

As we mentioned, most of our readers will never need the additional load capacity of the Air 2 making the DJI Ronin S the better gimbal to add to your d5500 camera accessories in our opinion. The Ronin S is cheaper, newer, has better performance, and has almost as much load capacity as the Air 2 anyway.

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