How good is the Manfrotto 488RCO head?

nigpd

nigpd

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Nigel
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I have a Manfrotto 488RCO head that I intend to mate with a Gitzo tripod in the near future (dont know which one yet)

Has anyone got any practical experience of this head thaat could tell me how well it performs?

Is this head good enough for say, a Canon 300mm f2.8 or a Canon 100-400?

If not, what alternatives should I be looking at?

Thanks in advance for your help
 
So much depends on your intended uses for these lenses. The two lenses you seem to be considering imply that your intended use may be for wildlife/ action shots?

The ballhead you have certainly seems to be capable of supporting both these lenses but it's far from an ideal solution. In practise it would mean you slacking off the head to enable panning and tilting to follow any sort of moving target and you can get by doing this as long as you appreciate that as soon as you remove your hands from the camera and lens you need to tighten the head or the camera lens combo is likely to flop over quite heavily with the weight involved, possibly causing damage.

The ideal solution is a gimbal head - once balanced properly these heads enable you to loose the camera with the lens at virtually any angle and they stay put pending your next photo oiportunity.

The Manfrotto 393 is the cheapest gimbal on the market. It's simply engineered but performs well and comes with a long lens plate supplied. The Canon 300mm 2.8 can easily be set up to see-saw perfectly on the 393.

There are plenty of other gimbals on the market - most of them far more expensive and certainly better engineered, lighter and more compact - you need to do a bit of Googling on 'gimbal heads' to get an idea of what's available and the various prices.
 
nigpd said:
Thanks for the reply Cedric. Loosk like a gimbal for wildlife and for the odd air display I guess.

I should hope the head will be ok for landscape work :shrug:
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Your ball head will be fine for landscapes, portraits - any application where you don't need fluid continuous movement of the camera.

A gimbal head can still be used for those applications too of course with the head completely locked off.
 
I have a 488 head (I use the RC4 quick release) and the 488 has a brilliant panning feature that works well. Not sure if the above guys own this one?
 
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