[DarkKnight (Kev)]

My saga to purchase a mount is ongoing and I wont elaborate here.

Thinking ahead for when that is resolved, I decided to purchase a ball head to mount my camera on. I decided on a ball head because I figured that it would give me a bit more flexibility in fine tuning the alignment of my camera with the mount.

OK, coming from a photography background I know a little bit about ball heads and know that 'a good, cheap ball head' is an oxymoron.

However my needs in this instance were quite specific and to this end I ordered a cheap ($60ish) iOptron job from the States.

I thought that being in the telescope and mount game iOptron would have their act together from a precision point of view. Wrong !!!

As you can see from the attached picture, when you drop the clamp down into the slot it goes several degrees past the perpendicular. Even the bubble level shows that.

What this does is introduce an area of unnecessary adjustment to bring the clamp face back to the perpendicular plane.

However the more concerning aspect is that to set the clamp face perpendicular, the weight of the attached camera and lens now has to be contained by the two ball head lock knobs, instead of the clamp shaft being supported at 90° by the bottom of the slot. With the specified maximum load of 20lb it will be almost impossible to stop the dreaded droop.

I would have thought that precision would have been high on iOptron's design brief but feel that this has slipped under their radar.

OK, it's a $60 ball head, but I don't think it would have cost any more to have designed the thing correctly. I can probably bodgie it up by packing the bottom of the slot but sheesh, I shouldn't have to.

This was my first iOptron purchase and to be brutally honest it has made me very wary of purchasing any more of their products.