expatinasia said:
Tinky said:
A good counterbalanced tripod head makes fluid movements very easy to achieve, even with a big heavy camera, looks like a manfrotto 504 or 510 Keiths using, good starting point, I prefer Vinten pro-touch's or sachtlers
Just curious, but why do you prefer Vinten heads to the Manfrotto? Any Vinten in particular? I use the 502HD which is not too big and heavy, but works well.
I also googled the sachtler legs you mentioned, they look amazing but are also very pricey.
Thanks.
The 502 is built to a price, it has lots of strengths, and hides it's shortcomings well, but as you ask...
Weight capacity is lower than vinten
The counterbalancing in the vinten and sachtlers is variable (on the big menfrottos you need to swap out springs depending on the weight of the camera, on the small manfrottos the counterbalance is fixed). counterbalancing is the key to resistance free movements. You can touch a massive canera with one finger and get a totally controlled movement, on a poorly counterbalanced tripod you constantly compensate and fight against the wrong weight of spring.
It's night and day. good tripods cost much much more, not through extravagance.
The quaity of the pan and tilt resistance, vintens and sachtkers use oil cartidges, the cheaper manfrottos used to use teflon plates,nthen went to basic fluid cartridges, which are prone to bounceback and judder, smooth ramping is made much more difficult.
Then its little things like handle rosettes, on the cheaper manfrotto, these are cast as part of the main head, on better tripods they are faces that can be repkaced when the risettes wear out, which they will.
For eng I mostly use a vinten pro-touch 5, so ething like a sachtler ace costs the same as a 502 and video legs, and for my money is the far superior head.