2011-12-29T19:00:00
Rated 3 out of 5
Design Falls Short in the Field
I have found most Giottos products to be well designed and constructed. This one comes close, but suffers from an almost fatal flaw: attachment of the head.
Small, lightweight tripods are invariably design compromises -- they just don't have the stiffness and freedom from vibration one would like. This one is as good in those aspects as any other, maybe better, but the way they have designed the head attachment is astoundingly weak. This is not rocket science, folks.
Almost all professional quality ball heads today have a 3/8" female insert to mount onto a tripod. Most tripods have both 3/8" and 1/4" studs on the center post to allow virtually any head to be attached. Giottos chose to provide a 1/4" stud surrounded by a spring-loaded thin wall tube threaded to 3/8" rather than a solid stud. A 3/8" stud would provide twice the shear strength of a 1/4" stud to hold the head onto the tripod (in case you dropped the tripod, for example, or it fell over in the wind), but the threaded tubing is almost useless. I broke mine just attempting to attach a ball head. Had it broken in the middle of a photo expedition in the field it would have been catastrophic.
What can you do? You can, of course, put an adapter on your head to change its thread to 1/4" but that still leaves a weak attachment point compared to using a real 3/8" stud. A better course is to replace the standard center post with Giottos' optional short post which does not incorporate the idiotic threaded tube but instead has a real, solid 3/8" attachment stud. Why they could not have done the same with the standard post is a mystery. But then, the long standard post is pretty useless on any lightweight tripod anyway because it has no vibration resistance when extended.
My other complaint with this tripod is the rubber tipped feet. Out in the field you really need spikes, and many manufacturers provide dual-purpose feet. Giottos makes you buy replacement feet in order to have spikes.
By the time you buy the replacement spikes and the replacement center post for this tripod you have absorbed more than fifty bucks of additional cost which IMHO should not be necessary.
WADE G.
