I've been operating gimbals for almost 3 years now with most of my time spent on MoVI systems. I say this because I know how gimbals should work and it's easy to tell when they don't.
Since release the Ronin S has performed very poorly with centering and the deadband. In fact it's so poor that unless you use custom settings with no deadband and max sensitivity, the gimbal will never actually reach the center again without double-tapping the trigger.

Let me lay out the major issues I (and many others) have experienced as clearly as possible:

• The gimbal does not return to center. It stops at the edge of the deadband, yet continues to move at an incredibly slow rate as it approaches this point.
• A tilted down pan to the left (CCW) causes big jerks between the tilt & pan motors. Since part of this motion is a way to put it in inverted mode (as the roll arm becomes horizontal) it has not been handled well
• There are times where the gimbal reacts differently when rotating it CW or CCW - I think this may have been largely caused by the push pan mode however.
  

I made a YouTube video about this and there are about 30 people to date who have commented complaints about experiencing similar issues and are equally disappointed.

Since this is your first tilted arm design I can somewhat understand the failure to write a control algoirthm to manage it properly but I can't understand how such a critical part of the function of a gimbal was somehow overlooked. The whole purpose of a gimbal in it's normal state of us is to stablise AND to return to the centerpoint. I had someone try to argue that it's fine because of the deadband, but at what point does this error suddenly become unacceptable? 5 degrees? 20 degrees? 75 degrees? On most gimbals I have used the error is zero (unless deadband set otherwise).


Please release a firmware update to correct these issues. It's extremely irritataing comepensating for a deadband you don't want but you know is required for smoothness.

I know this is at least the 5th or 6th thread that I have read on this issue, but I will comment anyway and say I 100% agree with you, this is a terrible design flaw and none of the paid schills on YouTube seem to discuss this issue at all; either that or there are some versions out there in the wild that actually perform as expected and we got the bad ones. If the Crane 3 wasn't such a disappointment (and weird design) I would have already sold my Ronin S.

All DJI needs to do is add an option to return to center and I will be very happy with this gimbal. I understand this is their first tilted design but come on; not one of their other gimbals does this. Imagine if you had to double tap a button after every pan on any one of their drone products or Ronin M, or Ronin, or Ronin MX. NONE of DJI's OWN gimbals operates like this EXCEPT the Ronin S. None of their other gimbals even needs a button to recenter the gimbal because they already do it AUTOMATICALLY. I think this is just a firmware flaw that DJI has yet to admit to and will eventually quietly fix in a firmware update without ever admitting it was a flaw.

Yep mine gets of center a lot. We need a firmware fix like yesterday.

Hi _nzsjoel, you have our sincere apologies for the unpleasant experience with Ronin-S. We care much about your feedback and will do our best to help.
For the centering issue, we will optimize it via the firmware update, please note the future update.
For the other two issues, we would very appreciate if you could share us a quick short video clip.

Drifting and not returning to center I hope to the gimbal gods is fixed. If not I’m bailing.

DJI Mindy Posted at 2-26 03:00
Hi _nzsjoel, you have our sincere apologies for the unpleasant experience with Ronin-S. We care much about your feedback and will do our best to help.
For the centering issue, we will optimize it via the firmware update, please note the future update.
For the other two issues, we would very appreciate if you could share us a quick short video clip.

DJI Mindy,  that is the best news I have heard in awhile, I will hang onto the Ronin S a little longer and wait for this update. If they could also fix the Bluetooth issues that would be nice as well. Currently I have to start the app, then turn on and off the Bluetooth sometimes a couple of times for the app to detect that it is on. I use an iPhone 6.

Stanley James Posted at 2-26 15:35
DJI Mindy,  that is the best news I have heard in awhile, I will hang onto the Ronin S a little longer and wait for this update. If they could also fix the Bluetooth issues that would be nice as well. Currently I have to start the app, then turn on and off the Bluetooth sometimes a couple of times for the app to detect that it is on. I use an iPhone 6.

Hi Stanley, we will keep optimizing our products. For the Bluetooth issue, please make sure there is no other Bluetooth is turned on when connecting to Ronin-S, did you enable all the access to Ronin APP during the installation?

DJI Mindy: any idea about firmware schedule? Sold my gopro gimbal when I bought this and haven’t been able to use this, because of  this recenter issue - gimbals just shouldn’t work like this.

Any update on this issue, I have done everything to try and get my gimbal to work like my cheaper Feiyu a2000 but my Ronin s still won’t go back to center when tilting or panning and will always have to double click the trigger to point it straight after every movement, I give up on DJI, is there anyway for them to just take it back or replace my faulty expensive piece of metal...?

I just bought the Ronin S and I am experiencing the pan recentering  issue. I’m looking at doing a wedding this weekend. I don’t see anything in the last firmware update that fixes this problem. Has there been a fix? I saw a message from three weeks ago from a customer who was asking these same questions. I don’t really know what to do except return it and hope the retailer has another brand in stock. Tell me I’m wrong and there is a fix.

Nope...No fix, I'm still stuck with this gimbal.  Get your money back if you can.

I am so frustrated too because some of the DJI products seem as Test products designed to be praised by paid youtube shills who never mention anything that is bad. I found so many issues with Ronin S and send so many mail and complaints, and of course, i always get som generic response and replay that it will be presented to R&D department...but never any improvement. This was one of the things that i've complained about ( because i've worked with other gimbals too ) and i know what is working as it should be. My advice is to get rid of ronin because DJI support is horrific.