Trying to buy an inexpensive tripod
At the end of November, I was looking for a solid tripod to hold my Canon Digital Rebel XT with a long lens (Canon 70-200 f4L (Merry Christmas to me!)). I did some reading on the Canon Digital Photography Forum, and found a store on ebay that was selling tripods that many people thought well of. A smaller number had terrible experiences with them, but I decided to take a risk anyway.
So, from amvona.com, I bought an ATH-01H ball pan head, and the AT-858B legs to go with it. Total price, $62.19 with shipping, although it took a month (11/30 - 12/27) to arrive. Now, the head looks pretty good. It seems to be solid and well built. The legs were a different story. I bought an open box (returned) set of legs, with the note that they might have some small scratches and dents. When they arrived, they seemed quite solid and well built, but unfortunately, they did have a dent. One that keeps one of the legs from extending. At all. they were also missing a bolt that keeps the top of the tripod extended. This seems like an obvious case of someone returning an item and then Amvona immediately shipping it back out without checking to see if it worked. The best built two legged tripod in the world is pretty much a useless beast.
The other thing about Amvona is that they’re pretty much completely unresponsive to email from ebay. I have contacted them 7 times since November, and they have responded to one email of those seven. I have also left messages with the support person who finally called me back, but she will not return my calls. I finally, today, got a different support person on the phone (not and easy task, unfortunately), and sent him an email description and pictures of the problem. No reply to let me know that he had received the email.
I figure sometime next week, I’m just going to call it a wash and a (relatively inexpensive) learning experience, although I might open an ebay complaint. Apparently, these guys are also aggressive in sending retaliatory negative ebay comments, so I haven’t decided how I’ll handle that.
Meanwhile, anyone have any good tripod recommendations?