Blitzwolf BW-BS8 review: universal selfie stick with light, tripod and remote control

A huge num­ber of peo­ple like to take self­ies and take pic­tures against the back­ground of var­i­ous places accord­ing to the prin­ci­ple “the best cam­era­man is myself, the best cam­era is a smart­phone.” But in such an impor­tant and respon­si­ble busi­ness, you can’t do with­out a spe­cial device called “Self­ie-Stick” or, in Russ­ian, a self­ie stick, which allows you to select the right dis­tance to the lens and remote­ly release the smart­phone cam­era. It would seem that in such a sim­ple design it is dif­fi­cult to improve any­thing and come up with some­thing new, but inquis­i­tive minds in search of poten­tial buy­ers keep adding use­ful changes here and in this short review we will talk about the Blitz­wolf BW-BS8 mul­ti­func­tion­al self­ie stick with LED — back­light, remote con­trol, as well as quick­ly and eas­i­ly trans­form­ing into a tri­pod.

Fea­tures Blitz­wolf BW-BS8:

The card­board pack­ag­ing is dec­o­rat­ed in tra­di­tion­al Blitz­wolf green and white col­ors.

Inside the box is a self­ie stick, a short microUSB cable for recharg­ing the built-in bat­ter­ies, and an instruc­tion book­let.

The self­ie stick is made of smooth, thick black plas­tic, and when fold­ed, it is about 19 cm long and weighs 187 grams in total.

In the hand, the device lies quite com­fort­ably, a cer­tain solid­i­ty is felt in the whole struc­ture, noth­ing dan­gles or creaks here.

The smart­phone mount allows you to install devices with a width of 55 to 85 mm, i.e. this rough­ly cor­re­sponds to smart­phones with a screen diag­o­nal of 3.5 to 6 inch­es.

The spring-loaded upper part of the mount acts as a clamp. The springs are pret­ty stiff and take a bit of tweak­ing to quick­ly mount/remove the smart­phone from the mount, there are also rub­ber pads on the top and bot­tom.

At the top there is an addi­tion­al source of dif­fused light in the form of a small LED flash­light with a built-in bat­tery. The flash­light, in fact, is a sep­a­rate device, and it is con­trolled using a sin­gle but­ton locat­ed on the left: a quick dou­ble press turns on the flash­light at min­i­mum bright­ness, sub­se­quent press­es switch the bright­ness to medi­um and max­i­mum, respec­tive­ly, the third press turns on the strobe mode, and the fourth turns the flash­light off .

Accord­ing to the spec­i­fi­ca­tions, the capac­i­ty of the built-in bat­tery is a mod­est 80 mAh, but my mea­sure­ments showed a lit­tle more — 86 mAh. I checked how much this capac­i­ty is enough when using the flash­light at max­i­mum bright­ness. This does not hap­pen often, but the time com­plete­ly coin­cid­ed with the declared one and the lamp worked for about 50 min­utes before it went out. Accord­ing to the same char­ac­ter­is­tics, at medi­um bright­ness this time will be up to 135, and at min­i­mum — up to 300 min­utes. In my opin­ion, this is a very good result.

To charge the bat­tery, use the microUSB con­nec­tor locat­ed on the right.

Dur­ing charg­ing, the flash­light glows red, and when it is com­plet­ed, it sim­ply goes out.

The mount has the abil­i­ty to adjust the angle of rota­tion and, with a notice­able effort, a sequen­tial rota­tion of approx­i­mate­ly 45 ° occurs with a clear fix­a­tion in the cur­rent posi­tion.

In the max­i­mum unfold­ed state, the length of the self­ie stick is 820 mm.

The slid­ing bar is made of met­al, it extends and folds with notice­able effort. Appar­ent­ly, this is facil­i­tat­ed by plas­tic rings-gas­kets installed at the junc­tion of the sec­tions.

The smartphone’s descent is con­trolled using a sep­a­rate small blue­tooth remote con­trol, which is placed in a spe­cial mount at the con­di­tion­al loca­tion of the thumb.

If nec­es­sary, the remote con­trol can be removed from the mount and used sep­a­rate­ly from the self­ie stick.

The only shut­ter but­ton is equipped with a built-in indi­ca­tion LED: in the device search mode, the indi­ca­tor flash­es or lights up when there is an estab­lished con­nec­tion.

The remote con­trol also has a built-in bat­tery with a capac­i­ty of 55 mAh. The stat­ed oper­at­ing time is up to 40 hours and I made an attempt to check this, kept the remote con­trol on all day long. The fact is that when inac­tive for about half an hour, the remote con­trol auto­mat­i­cal­ly “falls asleep”, so it had to be peri­od­i­cal­ly “awak­ened”. So, dur­ing the whole day the remote con­trol worked prop­er­ly and in the end I just did not have the patience, so I think that the man­u­fac­tur­er did not dis­sem­ble here either. The bat­tery is also charged via the microUSB con­nec­tor locat­ed at the end of the remote con­trol.

To con­nect the remote con­trol, you need to turn it on by hold­ing the but­ton, and start search­ing for blue­tooth devices on your smart­phone and select “BW-BS8” among the avail­able ones. After that, press­ing the remote con­trol but­ton is per­ceived by the smart­phone as press­ing the phys­i­cal vol­ume up but­ton, and as you know, in cam­era mode, this but­ton in most mod­ern smart­phones dupli­cates the func­tion of the on-screen shut­ter but­ton. The remote con­trol works sta­bly with­in 5–7 meters from the smart­phone.

For those who sim­ply hold a self­ie stick in their hand may seem insuf­fi­cient or not always con­ve­nient, anoth­er func­tion of this device will sure­ly be use­ful — the abil­i­ty to trans­form into a tri­pod using spe­cial fold­ing legs, which are hid­den in the han­dle when not in use.

The legs are made of met­al, for greater sta­bil­i­ty rub­ber caps are pro­vid­ed at the ends. Each of the three legs recline man­u­al­ly sep­a­rate­ly, after which it is nec­es­sary to turn a spe­cial ring to pre­vent spon­ta­neous fold­ing of the legs.

Now you can put the self­ie stick some­where on the table and use it as a small tri­pod, and con­trol the shoot­ing with the remote con­trol from any con­ve­nient place.

In real con­di­tions, it looks like this.

At the end of the han­dle of the self­ie stick there is a sock­et with a 1/4″ thread, which allows, if nec­es­sary, to install this device on any pho­to tri­pod. But that’s not all. With the help of the mount includ­ed in the kit, you can turn it into a pho­to tri­pod and the self­ie stick itself.

More­over, you can either com­plete­ly remove the smart­phone mount and install a pho­to mount instead of it, or use them togeth­er.

The pho­to mount does not lim­it the abil­i­ty to move the smart­phone mount at all.

Accord­ing to the man­u­fac­tur­er’s assump­tions, in this case, almost every­thing can be installed on a self­ie stick, from an action cam­era to a SLR cam­era.

At first I was skep­ti­cal about the very idea of ​​installing some­thing heav­ier here than a dig­i­tal soap dish, but nev­er­the­less I decid­ed to try and fix a DSLR here.

And I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised. The open­ing radius of the legs of the tri­pod turned out to be quite suf­fi­cient to con­fi­dent­ly sup­port the weight of the cam­era and not try to fall along with it on any side. The heli­cal plat­form itself made it pos­si­ble to tight­en the mount well and it does not dan­gle at all.

That is, in the absence of a full-fledged tri­pod, the Blitz­wolf BW-BS8 can be used as an alter­na­tive, but with the pro­vi­so that this will hap­pen in the fold­ed state. The fact is that with an increase in the height of the cam­era, the cen­ter of grav­i­ty also moves accord­ing­ly, there­fore, in this state, the risk of over­turn­ing the entire struc­ture increas­es sig­nif­i­cant­ly. The lim­it for me is approx­i­mate­ly the height of the exten­sion to one knee of the bar.

In my opin­ion, the Blitz­wolf BW-BS8 self­ie stick does­n’t look quite as girly as a lot of female-ori­ent­ed mod­els, but it still works equal­ly well on wall­pa­per floors. The man­u­fac­tur­er man­aged to cre­ate a very inter­est­ing, rather com­pact and, at the same time, almost uni­ver­sal mod­el that com­bines a large num­ber of use­ful func­tions and is not lim­it­ed to using it only with smart­phones.

The mod­el turned out to be very pop­u­lar — judg­ing by the sta­tis­tics of Bang­good, at the time of pub­li­ca­tion of the review, about 1,500 copies had already been sold. As for the cost, tak­ing into account the use of the coupon code “4482e3» it will make $17.99.

go to prod­uct page