Hi
a few weeks ago I asked about a ballhead for panoramic imaging here on this very fine forum. I ended up buying a arca swiss p0 head (and not the acra tec gp-s, the reason was the different design of the "plate" that sits on the tripod (in upside down mode for the gp-s it is "starshaped") between the two heads and the size) for my rrs24L tripod, fits the tripod perfectly. Thanks for the interesting discussion and your help.
now I do have a few questions. I quite like the head and I think it is hard to beat at the price and size and weight (and ok for my mft gear). But it isn't perfect, when either the pan or the ball is loose there is some slackness and even if the ball and the pan aren't locked down quite hard, there seems to be sometimes some slackness (very little and only if you apply quite a lot of force (I guess with a large tele and an slr I would be quite worried)).
so this isn't that bad and I don't worry about it that much, I wonder though if the slackness in the unlocked pan is the same with a d4 or a cube...
the other thing that is a bit more annoying is the leveling. even though the p0 has a rather small ball it isn't that hard to get to the point where I think it should be level. I can make fine adjustments quite easily but when I rotate the camera on the panning base then the bubble sometimes moves and says it is no longer leveled (the tripod was standing on solid ground, no grass or rug or something like that). for panos this isn't a problem I think, the stitching software seems to deal with that quite nicely (on the other hand I had a stitching error in an image and I really can't explain that error since it is on the roof of a building that was quite far away from the pov and I also used a nodal rail, so maybe that badly leveled camera was the cause?) but for single images it often is quite noticeable that the camera wasn't leveled.
now I wonder: has anyone some of the same problems and do you know where the problem is. is it the leveling that can't be that precise with the small spirit levels or is the quick release clamp not parallel to the panning base? or is it something different entirely. and of course it would be very interesting what one can do to improve the leveling.
I also have a question about PTGui, I recently purchased the software (not the PRO, but will upgrade soon) and I upgraded to the latest version. I have a quad core i7 thinkpad with 8gb ram and x64 win7. The problem I have is that during the creation of the panorama (the last step) the computer crashes horribly and I have to turn it of, I can't even open the task manager. I think the last time something similar happend sometimes was with windows ME! It happens when I try to do something else during the panorama creation. A few other programs were open at the time (browser, Lightroom) and the last time it happened was when I tried to display the desktop, so I didn't really do much but that apparently was enough. Anyone had similar problems?
ok that's it for now
looking forward to your comments.
simon