Pan-and-Tilt Head Built Like a Tank
Review by Erik Vlietinck
The FlexTILT Head 2 is a pan-and-tilt head. It’s a precision CNC-machined aluminum base with three double arms that are joined together using hex screws. It has a rotating base and a level spirit.
It’s not a ballhead, so the camera will always stay level laterally, which is an advantage when you’re shooting a panorama. Thanks to the rotating base with increment marks, you can rotate the camera 160° in the horizontal plane.
Besides its excellent quality of material, the FlexTILT Head 2 is also extremely well built. The arms and connecting hex screws are made to such tight standards that you can adjust the friction endlessly without weakening the connection. In fact, the FlexTILT Head 2 comes with a set of spanners [wrenches] so you can adjust the joints for each individual job, if you like.
I changed the friction at least a couple of dozen times on every joint and I didn’t have to tighten more as the number of adjustments increased. Out of the box, the joints are tightened to a high degree, which results in your having to exert quite a bit of force to unfold the arms the first time. The tighter the joints, the harder it is to adjust the camera position accurately. And that’s why you may have to spend some time setting up the FlexTILT Head 2 for your specific camera and often per case, because it takes a bit of experimenting to find the right balance between tension and handling ease.
The system lets you easily adjust for parallax in a panorama setup, but it can also be used by itself, sitting on a flat surface and perfectly balanced, if you keep the camera’s center point over the head’s center point. ■
