Photoclubalpha

Picked on up recently and I'm impressed what a clever design. The multi-function arm is quick and secure to set and unlock with just a twist. My biggest beef with most tripods is you can't always get a position easily and quickly. That arm is a huge stress buster as you can freely rotate it around and quickly lock it in place. Build is good, nice quality ball head with 3 levels, decent build overall, usual not bad bag. Not cheap, but not stupidly expensive and solid overall.

Could be very useful for general use. If you do macro "this is the tripod" to make your life a lot easier honestly it's impressive how you can get some pretty funky angles that would be a lot more fiddly with normal tripods.

It makes the Manfrotto-patented horizontal center column design look clumsy and dated. Big thumbs up for the multi function arm.
Never seen anything else quite like it, but this one hits the spot very nicely

Rather than post shots have a look at the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3C1axssyLs

Looks interesting. Fine for a variety of still positons. I wonder how it would perform on video. Notice that the head is mounted on a 1/4" screw. I guess that means one could remove the supplied head and fit a dedicated video head for video. I wonder how smooth the panning is with the standard head and using the arm. One of the problems I experienced on starting to video was the jerking produced when panning on a standard tripod. I have actually purchased a video head to fit on to one of my standard tripods. Not ideal but reduces the amount of gear to carry around. Can get this tripod on Amazon UK for less than £115. Not bad.

You can buy the "boom arm" on it's own and add it to your tripod just screw it in.
http://www.velbon.co.uk/products/access ... m_arm.html

It is quite smooth but that is going to vary depending on how much you "twist/clamp" it via the locking mechanism. I suspect it might be of some use with a video head. I can see why it's with a ball head on the VS 443D, but you can add a pan/tilt or video head. Overall as a "deal" you get some decent legs, the boom arm, and a decent ball head for a pretty fair price. The acid test for me is I find it very easy to get to any position I want now, and you can get to some very interesting ones quite easily. For static video shots I am sure some would find it very useful.

The boom arm is nice it would be hard to go back to a normal bog standard tripod after this.