Need to upgrade to a better travel tripod soon but haven’t made your pick? This spreadsheet should help you make an informed choice.
Upgrading or adding gear to our tools of the trade is both exciting and taxing. Imagine all the choices that you have to sift through for cameras alone — what more for other items like lenses, lighting, camera bags, and even tripods? It’s tedious to browse for honest reviews from all the photography websites and blogs. So, we really appreciate Redditor u/Shpox putting together a travel tripod comparison spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet compares models from various brands according to several pertinent values: weight, size when folded, maximum height, payload (as declared by the brands), center column, tripod head, and price in AUD and USD (as of August 2019). So far, models from Sirui, Peak Design, Manfrotto, Gitzo, Zomei, LeoFoto Urban, LeoFoto Armour, and LeoFoto Ranger are included on this spreadsheet.
This is really helpful as we need to see how different models from various brands compare based on their specifications (and yes, that includes price). This makes it a lot easier to narrow down our choices to three or four, which we can research further via more in-depth reviews. Referring to this comparison is also a lot faster than asking around or crowdsourcing for recommendations (which we’ll still have to perform further research on).
Additionally, we can refer to the thread where u/Shpox shared this spreadsheet for real user insights and recommendations. That gives us an idea about how these travel tripods perform out in the field, the best feature for each model, and which is worth the investment. These user inputs and experiences could ultimately guide our final choice.
If you have a travel tripod recommendation you want to see on the list, you might want to chime in on the r/photography thread!