From birds on the wing to wild beasts on the hoof, and from athletes or racecars to aircraft at aerobatic displays, it can be hard to track the action. In fact, it can literally be a pain if you’re using a heavy telephoto lens to close the distance between yourself and what you’re shooting. Shoot handheld and you’ll be feeling the strain sooner rather than later. Use a tripod or monopod and a conventional head will lose its balance as soon as you start tilting the camera.
The great thing about the best gimbal heads is that they effectively make your camera weightless. Taking the load out of heavier setups, a good gimbal head effectively supports the camera in suspension, maintaining its center of gravity during tilting and panning, and making it easy to hold it indefinitely in any position, even when the tilt lock is loosened.
A good gimbal head therefore gives you a rock-solid base for panning shots even if you're using an ultra-heavy telephoto lens. They’re typically used by bird photographers and at airshows, where you need to move a super-telephoto lens quickly to keep up with a subject - and where you’ll often need to wait ages to get the shots you want. They're not necessary for everyone, so if you're using lighter lenses, you may want to consider one of the best ball heads instead.
Gimbal heads tend to be sophisticated pieces of kit that command a steep selling price, but that’s not always the case. It pays to choose wisely, so I’ve scoured the shelves to find the best gimbal heads available. From various different manufacturers, these are the gimbal heads I reckon offer the best bang for your buck right now.
Ben is the Imaging Labs manager, responsible for all the testing on Digital Camera World and across the entire photography portfolio at Future. He's also the team's man-at-arms when it comes to camera accessories – his lab is a bit like the Batcave of photography! With years of experience trialling and testing kit, he's a human encyclopedia when it comes to recommending the best buys.
The quick list
Best overall
Benro's carbon fibre gimbal head is our top pick – blending a lightweight build with heavy payload support and butter-smooth engineering. Excellent stuff.
Best premium
Wimberley's perennially popular gimbal head is an expensive but fantastic choice, with superb freedom of movement and tight tolerances.
Best value
Selling for a snip, this K&F Concept heavy duty gimbal impresses with a hefty 20kg payload and solid aluminum construction, with a full range of movement.
Best for travel
With a unique folding design, Benro's GH2F is much more portable than other gimbal heads, though this does come at the cost of some payload capacity.
Best for professionals
Big, heavy and expensive, the ProMediaGear Katana is intimidating in more ways than one – but it's among the best gimbal heads we've tested.
Best budget alternative
While it's not a gimbal head exactly, the Manfrotto 393 Long Lens Monopod Bracket is a solid, budget-friendly alternative that works with a monopod.
Best gimbal heads
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Best overall
What's so good about the Benro GH5C? One major ace in the hole for this gimbal head is its carbon fiber construction. This material is both stronger and lighter than the other main construction material for heads and tripods – aluminum – and means that you'll be able to support heavier payloads with the head, and have an easier time ferrying it to and from your shooting locations. And we do mean heavy payloads, with the GH5C (no relation to the Panasonic GH5) able to support a whopping 29.94kg of kit, which is more than enough for even chunky pro video setups.
Benro has outdone itself with the engineering here; the movement of the GH5C is smooth as butter, even when it's loaded up to the nines. Panning movements are made ridiculously easy, on both horizontal and vertical axes. It comes at a cost, but this is a tool made for and marketed to professionals, so that's to be expected.
Best premium
The Wimberley WH-200 Version II is an all-around excellent gimbal head, with a well-deserved reputation in the industry. Offering superb freedom of movement even with the largest lenses, the WH-200 Version II has a redesigned panning base compared to the original, with zero play, and its pan-locking knob has been moved to the side for easier one-handed operation. The knobs themselves are grippy and ergonomically designed, making them easy to adjust even when you're wearing gloves.
In use, it's absolutely sublime, both fluid and firm when it needs to be. Wimberley has gone over this head from top to bottom to ensure tight tolerances, and the pan and tilt axes turn with exceptional smoothness. The standardized Arca-Swiss mount ensure broad compatibility, and Wimberley even supplies replacement low-profile lens feet to ensure compatibility with lenses that have a taller than average foot. It's only the higher-than-average asking price that keeps this out of the top spot, but if your budget goes this far, it's absolutely worth it.
Best value
There’s nothing cheap about the look and feel of this heavy duty gimbal head, despite its amazingly inexpensive selling price. It weighs in at 1.43kg and has a beefy 20kg maximum load rating – definitely sufficient for the full-sized cameras and monster telephoto lenses for which it’s primarily designed. That said, it’s also advertised as being suitable for relatively lightweight action cameras and even smartphones.
It has a solid aluminum build, with a pipe diameter of 32mm and a base diameter of 50mm, along with a 3/8” base mounting socket, ideally suited to similarly heavy-duty tripods. It’s 230mm in height and features a full 360-degree panoramic base, complete with reference scale. The same goes for the adjustable height lifter with 7cm of travel, which again has calibrated markings. Locking knobs are on hand for the lifter as well as for panoramic swivel and pitch angle. The pitching angle itself also features full 360-degree rotation.
For easy attachment of cameras and telephoto lenses with tripod mounting collars, the head comes complete with an Arca-Swiss compatible quick-release plate, and it’s quite a long one to ensure a good balance. This gimbal works well and feels smooth in operation. It makes me wonder why I should spend any more.
Best for travel
An interesting addition to Benro's gimbal line-up, the GH2F differs from the regular GH2 in one key way – it has a folding design that means it packs down very small. Benro is clearly angling this towards travel photographers and those whose kit space is at a premium, and it works well. While additional moving parts in any gadget are always a bit of a risk – as they're another thing that can potentially break – the Benro GH2F is solidly constructed, and in use it doesn't feel at all fragile.
The movement of the gimbal is nice and smooth, particularly on the horizontal axis. Having a rotating Arca-compatible plate on the mounting arm is a welcome feature, as it means the user can very swiftly change to and from a vertical shooting orientation (the arm can also be removed entirely and used separately as an L-bracket for Arca-compatible heads). At 10kg, this is one of the lighter-payload gimbal heads, and it's also worth mentioning that its small dimensions mean you can be a little more restricted in terms of vertical camera movement.
Best for professionals
The Katana Professional looks more like a piece of weapons hardware than a camera support, owing to its macho design and huge 33cm height. Being such a tall gimbal does mean there’s plenty of vertical adjustment to perfectly balance even the largest lens.
The stellar build and material quality results in a load capacity of 23kg, ensuring any lens this side of the Hubble Space Telescope will have a stable footing. The only drawback of such strength is that, at 2.2kg, this is the heaviest gimbal here.
Maintenance-free steel ball bearings give perfectly smooth tilt and panning motion, and with no bearing slack when the locking knobs are undone. These are large enough for easy use in all weathers, plus they can be repositioned for more convenient access. You can also partly tighten the locking knobs to increase friction without introducing any jerkiness, and when fully tightened, your camera is held steady.
See our full PromediaGear GK Katana review
Best budget alternative
This isn’t actually gimbal head but, instead, operates as a jointed bracket. Despite its relatively basic design, it weighs 1.6kg and has a hefty maximum load rating of 20kg. The bracket is based on two U-shaped supports, the inner one rotating within the outer one. Three operating heights are available and you can even hang the lens from the inner support. Panning and tilting are both reasonably smooth. The bracket is primarily intended for use with a monopod but works equally well with a tripod. It’s not as sophisticated or as smooth-acting as the best gimbal heads, but we have found it a good budget alternative.
How to choose the best gimbal head
Gimbal heads are a very specific type of accessory, with a distinct list of features. While they tend to be oriented towards a more advanced photographer or videographer, everyone who gets one is going to be a first-time buyer once, so with that in mind we've put together a quick guide to the things to look for.
1. Vertical adjustment
You don't necessarily need to get a gimbal with vertical adjustment to feel the benefits of a gimbal head, but if you want to achieve complete weightlessness then you'll need it. The more vertical travel it has, the better.
2. Precision engineering
Loosening the clamps locking the pan base and tilt arm on cheaper gimbals, can introduce slack and wobble in the joints. Better designs will have tighter tolerances.
2. Precision engineering
Loosening the clamps that lock the pan base and tilt arm on cheaper gimbals can unfortunately introduce unwanted slack and wobble in the joints. However, better (and usually more expensive) designs will have tighter tolerances.
3. Ergonomics
While small dials and controls can look stylish and tidy, any wildlife photographer knows that it's easy to get caught short in bad weather. Set yourself up for success by looking for a gimbal head that has large controls that are easy to grip through gloves.
4. Mounting methods
All of the gimbal heads that we've featured in this guide use the Arca-Swiss mounting plate standard. If you purchase a gimbal head with a long plate, then you'll also get better adjustment.
5. Don't skimp on the legs
Mounting a gimbal head on a cheap travel tripod is akin to fitting a state-of-the-art lock to a flimsy wooden door. Look for sturdy, rigid legs, even if the combined weight will be unwieldy.
How we test gimbal heads
When it comes to accessories like gimbal heads, we do as much testing as possible in the field. We commission experienced reviewers who have used these products before and know exactly what to look for and where any weak points might be. For gimbal heads in specific, we look at stability, ease of setup, smoothness of operation and portability. We test how smoothly the camera moves, how securely it is held and whether there are any design niggles that prevent it from working as it should – e.g. different parts knocking into each other when the camera is moved to certain positions.
FAQs
What is a gimbal head used for?
A gimbal head is not the same thing as a stabilizing gimbal like the DJI Ronin SC, which is used for video. A gimbal head is designed for photographers, specifically those who are using long telephoto lenses. It provides smooth, stable movement of the camera and lens along horizontal and vertical axes, while also holding them steadily in position when the user lets go. Essentially, it means you get the stability of a tripod, and the fluidity and flexibility of hand-held shooting. For sports and wildlife photographers especially, they can be hugely useful.
Can you use a gimbal head on a monopod?
A standard gimbal head would technically fit on a monopod, but would likely be too big and unwieldy to really be what you'd call useful. However, some manufacturers do offer gimbal heads that are specifically designed to work on monopods, so if this is a route you want to go down, these are worth looking into – the Manfrotto 393 Long Lens Monopod Bracket featured on our list will work well.
