SmallRig Lightweight Fluid Video Head 3457B

My 3rd purchase from SmallRig during the 10.10 sale. Testament to the quality of their products. This tripod is the same. Well made, feels solid and sturdy, mechanism works great and ease of use with all the knobs at the right convenient locations. And the vertical horizontal adjustment feels secure. Highly recommended

A great rig for outdoor photography and videography

It's a great and smooth fluid head for the price. Just keep in mind you are not buying a high end studio piece of equipment here. This is great for field shoots that involve packing light and hiking or trekking to a shoot. Definitely worth the money for those fields of work. The handle twist lock extends to a reasonable and helpful length of just shy of a foot. The quick release mount gives you a rapid set up and tear down ability. It fits well on my heavier Manfrotto tripod as well as my lightweight carbon fiber Tiffen.

Good Value

This head works as advertised and seems well-made. It can be a little tricky to get everything lined up at first even with the rotable tightening handles. And sometimes it doesn't feel fluid so much as just stiff. But it works as advertised and for the price it seems like a good buy.

Just about perfect for my Fuji XT5

I bought this to use for my first attempt at shooting video of birds in flight using a 100-400mm zoom on my XT5. The head moves easily and smoothly, but tracking BIF is quite a challenge when they fill half the frame! I'm certainly not getting results worthy of Blue Planet, but I'm happy with this as a learning head. It's also nice for shooting stills of sitting/nesting birds but does drift a bit when you first tighten the clamps.

Nice in many respects but with one HUGE deal-breaker

Many reviews made me hopeful, and I own many excellent items made by SmallRig. I truly liked its feature set for what I wanted - a small, portable fluid-style head (though it is NOT a fluid-damped unit in any regard, just friction-damped). But one HUGE deal-breaker: its abhorrent panning axis is so rough it catches and grabs randomly when panning, even when fully unlocked. Moreover, when I would lock it down, just a bit of lateral nudge would cause it to begin to come unlocked. So, I could not trust it to remain locked down on that axis, and cannot smoothly pan on that axis. Deal breaker!! So despite all of its nice ideas, this head is not ready for prime time, even for very casual amateur use, imo. It is going back. Avoid.

Not as smooth as I'd hoped

With no weight on the head and fully unlocked, it feels very smooth moving in all planes; but, even with an 18-55 lens on my Fuji XT5, there always seems to be a bit of jerkiness when i pan. That jerkiness is greatly magnified when shooting with my 150-600 lens! The weight of the rig is under 5 pounds, so well within spec, so I wonder if my head is defective or if I really need a larger head to get smoother action with this rig.

Perfect solid and portable

I purchased this head for a video assignment that came up that included sit down interviews indoors as well as some outdoor activities like skiing and ice climbing. I'm very pleased with how this performed. I wanted something light, portable and of high quality and this ticks all the boxes. I love how the handle folds down to a small size and the fluid movement is very smooth. The bubble leveling indicator was very helpful and worked well. This is my first Smallrig product purchase and I'll definitely be looking at the brand in the future for other products.

Really high quality, low weight, compact fluid head that does everything the others can do and more.

It's perfect, I had a massive manfrotto before that weighed 5 times more than the camera, was a nightmare to use. This fluid head has improved my videos 10 fold, perfect light weight and easy to use, compact so easy to do fast panning sports shots. Can't be happier with the product.

Rotator doesn't lock

This was a disappointing purchase, as I have been happy with SmallRig items in the past. Overall the head is of reasonably good quality for the price. But the pan rotator des not fully lock down, even with the knob tightened. It still had about 5 degrees of free play. In addition, the rotator does not rotate smoothly; it has several sticking points as you turn it. Given that at least one other person has reported a similar problem, this may be either a design or quality control defect. This is only the second time I have had to return an item to B&H in over 20 years.