I've got a couple of Manfrotto ball heads, and a three axis head, a Manfrotto 804RC2. One nice thing about them all is that they all use the same quick release plate, of which I have something like half a dozen now, allowing me to just have them mounted on both bodies and a couple of my longer lenses.
For the most part, they work fine. However, for particularly heavy lenses, or long exposures, they are not as rock solid steady as I'd like. Also, if I adjust them using the bigma, I have to account for some inevitable droop. Likewise, I can never get quite as much angle above the horizon as I'd like with the three axis head. It being my birthday in a few hours (Bong being in Manilla, it is already his, Happy Birthday Bong), I could rationalize spending a bit of money on a better tripod head. I understand that there is effectively no limit to how much money that you can spend on a tripod head, but there are incremental improvements in quality. Doing a quick search, it looks like the 804RC2 goes for about $65. Also that it seems to be called a pan-tilt head. When I'm doing landscape work, I like the pan-tilt heads better than ball heads because I can adjust one angle, then fine tune another, and don't have to worry about losing all three adjustments when I want to fine tune one of them. What I'd like is: a) a pan-tilt head, b) that is significantly steadier/sturdier than the 804RC2 c) With a much greater range of vertical swing d) which, ideally, would take the same mount plate (200PL-14 ?) Using the same mount plate is negotiable, but it'd be a real drag to have to swap mount plates to use "the good tripod head". Any suggestions on which head to look at? How much would I need to pay to get much better performance? How would I tell that I was getting something better, rather than just more expensive? Load rating? -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
