Considering a fluid head - A7Riv and Tamron 28-200

Craig Gillette wrote:

Over the three weeks of the discussions so far several people have suggested that the lower priced heads are unusable. I'm going to assume that the commentators, reviewers, etc., that are reporting "good" results with a wide range of consumer grade products are getting "consumer" grade results. Perhaps many are actually satisfied and some are unaware of just how undemanding their taste or expectations are?

In the week or so since Amazon remembered how to deliver to me, I've only used the smaller one and it seems to perform just fine as a pan/tilt head or locked down in video.

I think this sums up the inexpensive lighter weight fluid video heads well, so long as you don't come close to exceeding their capacity and use them on a sturdy tripod. I'd even add that many of these inexpensive fluid video heads do tilts relatively smoothly when shooting video, but have trouble doing smooth video pans. That is probably a combination of the pan mechanism not having as much careful engineering put into it as does the tilt mechanism, combined with many lighter tripods twisting slightly around a vertical axis when doing a video pan, causing additional glitches at the start and end of the pan.

I did try tracking a trains a little and that's a technique I'll have to develop and practice more. It's quite different from free handing it with stills so i hesitate to blame the gear.

I haven't had the chance to take out and use the larger head, lens and tripod.