My friend seoulfully is looking for a tripod for his new dSLR, so I asked around and looked at various different sites for prices and reviews, narrowed down to the following:
Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod
: this thing is pretty cool, go to Manfrotto’s 190x website to check out the video, it’s like tripod pr0n… it’s not carbon fiber, but it’s pretty inexpensive.
Manfrotto 322RC2: grip action ball head is the way to go, this one is great because the center of mass is relatively low, this is important for macro photography coz you definitely do not want the camera to move around easily when you’re shooting at 1:1.
Both of them are eligible for Amazon Prime! 🙂 B&H also sells them as a kit, I think it will end up costing about the same with shipping.
If I were to upgrade my tripod setup I would probably get the same head, but go for carbon fiber legs. I’m still not sure if the 190MF3 or 190MF4 has the same center column that can tilt and switch between landscape and portrait orientations easily. and obviously Gitzo makes damn nice tripods, but they’re not cheap…