A common complaint that I have seen on the forums regarding ball heads is that the image shifts when locking the ball head up. This appears to be pretty ubiquitous with all heads exhibiting some level of shift, but I haven’t seen hard data on exactly how much shift there is for any given head. […]
Read MoreMonth: April 2018
New Rankings Page and Score Metric
I am updating the rankings page to incorporate a couple of developments regarding height and stiffness. Previously on the rankings page, I have reported the yaw stiffness for each tripod, and calculated a rough score metric by taking the stiffness*height/weight. This was simply the simplest thing I could think of at the time when I […]
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Approximating Tripod Stiffness vs Height
In a previous series of posts, I have laid out the models used for fitting stiffness vs height data, tested the Manfrotto MT055 tripods, tested a bunch of tripods, and compared the stiffness vs height for some very similar Really Right Stuff tripods. In these posts we learned that we could not fit the stiffness […]
Read MoreReally Right Stuff TVC 34L & TVC24L Stiffness vs Height
I recently had the chance to test the stiffness vs height for the Really Right Stuff TVC 34L and TVC24L tripods. I previously described the models for the stiffness vs height fits and tested a number of tripods, including the RRS TVC 33 and RRS TVC 23. This presents a unique opportunity. These two sets […]
Read MoreTop Plate Stability
In testing the Really Right Stuff TVC-23, I made the discovery that the top plate material can have a massive impact on the damping performance of the tripod, and a smaller impact on the overall stiffness. This inspired me to revisit my head testing setup. It is ideal to use the stiffest tripod possible, but […]
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Carbon Fiber vs. Aluminum Center Column
I have been occasionally testing the stiffness vs center column extension for various tripods, finding fairly consistent results. Recently though, I tested the center column stiffness on the Really Right Stuff TQC-14 and was surprised to find that the yaw (side to side motions) stiffness dropped off dramatically less than I had seen for the […]
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Stiffness vs Height for Various Tripods
In the first post in this series of stiffness vs height measurements, I laid out the motivation for doing this set of measurements and introduced the models I was going to be using to fit the data. Briefly, I want data to help understand tripod structure in the context of beam deflection, and to provide […]
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