Any experience with Sachtler tripods?

[knut_sverre_horn]

Think I'm gonna buy a Sachtler tripod, since my Manfrotto 055 turns

out to be not very helpful when shooting with 300 + 2x TC. Have any of

you got any experience with the Sachtler S14 long? :-) Knut-Sverre

[john_macpherson]

Knut - my partner and I *almost* bought a carbon-fibre Sachtler tripod

to go with a Sachtler fluid video head for 16mm use.

<P>

The tripod turned out not to have had the carbon tubes glued in

properly and they fell out when we took it out of the box. Seems it

slipped by the Sachtler quality control. Vendor (big pro film/video

equip. dealer) was most unhappy and promised all sorts of fixes if we

took the product (which they didn't stock due to cost and had to order

in specially for us to look at).

<P>

Given this lack of basic attention to detail we opted to buy another

brand. We took the Sachtler fluid head though which is superb, and

good with big 500/600mm 35mm lenses as well as with our 16mm camera.

<P>

This may be a completely unrepresentative example but, it is the only

experience I have to offer!

<P

[michael_schmidt2]

Hi Knut,

personally I have no experience with the Sachtler, but in Germany

(Icking, close to Munich) exists a shop, specialized in camera gear for nature photography and the quite competent owner (Klaus Bothe), who apparently speaks often with german pros in this field, is raving about the quality and handling.

There is also a review by german photographer Uwe Walz (in engl. available) on his website:

http://www.walz-naturfoto.de/englisch/index.htm (Title: From the deepfreeze into the oven).

Hope this helps, by the way address of the nature photo shop:

www.isarfoto.de.

They also ship worldwide.

cheers

Michael

[joseph_albert]

John,

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what you experienced is the achilles heal of carbon fiber. This material expands and contracts in response to temperature changes at a rather different rate than metal. The result is that carbon fiber tubing can become unglued from metal joints when the tripod is exposed to extremes of temperature. Gitzo carbon fiber tripods had this problem in the early versions. Subsequently, Gitzo started threading the joints and tubes and screwing them in as well as gluing them, and the problem seems to have been fixed. Evidently, Satchler hasn't figured this out yet or hadn't when you looked at the tripod. I don't know what Slik or Velbon do in this regard.