Description
There are many factors that determine the rigidity of a tripod leg, but the two main ones are 1) leg diameter and 2) section count. Leg diameter is the simple one – bigger is better and 40mm is the largest tube size that Leofoto makes. Joints perform an essential role in tripod design – they lock telescopic leg sections, which allow tripods to extend very tall, but fold down to a practical size. The more joints you add to a tripod’s leg, the shorter it folds down. This does however come with two downsides – each section/joint requires 3x actions (1x action per leg) to be deployed/extended. Joints also compromise rigidity – if you compare two tripods with the same leg diameter, but a 3-section and a 5-section version (e.g. LM-403 vs LM-405), you’ll quickly see that the 5-section has a lot more flex.
You can thus add more sections to a tripod to make it fold down shorter, but at some point you are compromising too much rigidity and deployment time. For some people 5-section tripods are great – such as photographers who do serious hiking or have to fly with their tripods often. The opposite is the SO-362C, a 2-section tripod which deploys at lightning speed and has incredible leg rigidity, but folds down to a whopping 1.2m. It is totally unpractical to travel or hike with, but for those who want the ultimate rigidity and deployment time, it is perfectly justified.
4-Section tripods like the LM-404 are arguably the most popular as they offer a sweet spot between everything, but 4-sections is still prioritizing folded size over rigidity. In our opinion, for the shooting and hunting market, 3-sections is the sweet spot. It can be deployed in under 10-seconds, offers incredibly rigid 40mm legs, but still folds down to 70cm, which you can hike and fly with if necessary.
