Leofoto LO-324C Tripod with Built-in Hollow Ball & Bag

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I’ve been nothing less than impressed with the quality and value of this tripod. Excellent purchase.

I love nearly everything about this tripod, its light weight, short collapsed length, and most notably the innovative "hollow ball” for leveling the center column, including the short center column supplied for using the tripod very close to the ground. The leveling and center-column height adjustment both work with one lever - excellent! The design also allows for reasonably fast reversal of the long center column for placing the camera under the tripod for very low level work. A complaint I have involves the optional short center column. To use it, you first remove the ballast hook from the long center column, then remove the column, both easy and quick. But the next step involves unscrewing the head-mounting platform and its screw (reversible 1/4-20 and 3/8-16) from the long center column. The latter requires loosening two set screws with a supplied hex wrench, then unscrewing the head platform and reattaching it to the short center column, which takes time and adds risk of dropping critical pieces. If the short center column could be supplied with its own head platform and center screw, the operation would be fast and safe. I would have been happy to pay the additional cost for these two small pieces of duplicate equipment.

I haven’t really used it yet but I really like the weight of it. I am not liking the hollow ball because I use a gimbal head so it gets a bit much as the weight of the camera and head force the center pole off course, I designed a bracket that should isolate the hollow ball from moving, gonna get it machined by a cnc machine. Everything else seems nice on it.