6 Pitfalls of Buying a Cheap Teleprompter

6 Pitfalls of Buying a Cheap Teleprompter

It can be tempting to purchase a cheap teleprompter instead of a higher-quality teleprompter. After all, who would not want to save a few hundred dollars? Actually, you don’t want to save that money if it is going to cause you major headaches during your video productions. And if you go cheap on a teleprompter, that is what will happen.

Some of the pitfalls of buying a cheap teleprompter include the following:

  1. Cheap beam splitter glass: The glass in your teleprompter is very important to a high quality, error-free video production. The beam splitter glass is right in front of your camera lens. If it is of poor quality, you are going to have problems with the color balance of your productions. Cheap teleprompters use cheap glass.
  2. Difficult to assemble: Cheap teleprompters use cheap clasps and connectors to put together the unit. You will not want to waste precious minutes of your time struggling to assemble a cheap teleprompter.
  3. Hard to tear down: An inexpensive teleprompter usually takes longer to take apart and take to the next job. How much is your time worth? Probably more than a few hundred dollars over the lifetime of the unit, that you saved when you bought a cheaper, inferior teleprompter.
  4. Poor software: A cheap teleprompter will almost always have poor software with it. It will not have the convenient features that you so desperately want to have when you are doing a shoot – spell check, font coloring, script editor, rich and plain text import, font alignment, adjustable margins and fonts, adjustable speed and more. Plus, you can bet that your cheap software will seize up and malfunction when you can least afford it.
  5. Bad mount and positioning: Your cheap teleprompter will probably have a mount that gives you headaches and  fits. A good teleprompter, such as the Telmax G2-19, will allow you to place the tripod of the teleprompter underneath the LCD display. You will not have to ever use counterweights. A cheap teleprompter will be poorly balanced and will shake and make you nervous.
  6. Poor frame: Your cheap unit will not have a high strength, low weight aluminum frame, such as the Telmax G2-17. This device is lightweight so you can tote it around easily but is plenty strong so that it is rock steady when you most need it to be.

The bottom line is that a cheap teleprompter will cost you more in hassle and headaches than it’s worth. Buy a high quality teleprompter and save yourself the bother.