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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to do a review of the Oban CT3535 carbon fiber
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I recently went on an extended trip to the state of Arizona and there was a number of
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photography related things I wanted to do while on that trip, including some backpacking
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and shooting some landscapes. I took along some gear to do some long exposure work. I also needed
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to do some video and some portraits. So I wanted to have a tripod along. However, while I have a
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number of tripods, none of them are very good for travel. My typical tripod that I use weighs in at
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about eight pounds and it's really not all that compact. And so I did a little bit of research and
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I elected to try out this Oban. It's the CT3535 tripod and then it comes with a combination with
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the BE208T ball head. So this combination, it weighs in at only a total of two and a half pounds
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That's 1.1 kilograms and frankly that's lighter than a number of lenses that I review
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And really importantly to me, it folds down into a very compact one foot or 30 and a half
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centimeter package which as you can see this is kind of my trail backpack that I use quite often
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it's a low pro versapack 200 aw and and so it is the tripod itself is no wider than the backpack
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and the way that it folds up it folds in such a way that there is no kind of protuberances that
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might catch on things and so as a result it's very easy to negotiate with this combination in fact
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it clips on there so easily on this particular combination that most of the time I took it off
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and I put it back on without even taking the backpack off. You know, if I just wanted to
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quickly go to a tripod setup. And then on top of that, I also traveled my main kind of way of
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hauling my gear was this Vanguard Heralder rolling backpack. It's got four wheels on the bottom
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It's got the extending out handle and so it's a nice thing for taking on the airline and my review of it will come shortly
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But I just put it down into this pouch on the side and it only really adds on about three and a half, four inches to the side
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And so in every way it is very compact. However once you actually assemble it out it got five different locking sections And by the way it also has three different locking positions You know depending on the situation that you in but if you extend out each one of those five sections one of the thing
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I will note is on the first day that I had it I continued to unlock in the wrong direction I
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wasn't familiar with it wasn't paying enough attention I kept screwing the wrong direction and you can actually unscrew any of these leg sections which obviously you don't want to do
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when I did that there was a little sleeve that came out and I had to kind of fit it back together
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and put it back together. So I do wish that it would kind of have some mechanism to where you
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can't over kind of loosen it too much. But once you get familiar with it of course it's no problem
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So once you fully assemble it and extend that center column to its highest position it gets
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you up to a height of 51.8 inches. That's 130 centimeters and so really it's fairly tall
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I'm about six foot one and so while it obviously doesn't get it up to eye height for me, it's really not all that bad to lean over and to look in through it and it's actually surprisingly stable here
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Now obviously like with any tripod, the lower you go in terms of the center column, the more stability that you get but overall I was surprised by how stable it holds everything
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One of the things that I was concerned about as a part of this is that my wide angle lens of choice is the Tamron 15-30mm f2.8VC
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It's a pretty heavy lens and because it has a curved front element, I use the Photodiox Wonder Pana filter system
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And the filters for that are 150mm and so all told it gets pretty hefty
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So what I wanted to know is that when I put the shooting position with the ball head, you know, into a, not just a vertical shooting position, but more importantly to me is that a lot of times I want to tilt the whole assembly up
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Is it going to be able to lock and hold everything? Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be any problem with that at all
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The ball head and tripod, it will handle a combination of up to nine pounds
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That's a little over four kilograms. Well, the combination I've got here, which is about as heavy as what I use, the Canon 100-400mm Mark II lens and then a 5D Mark IV body, that combination, it comes out to about 5.25 pounds, which leaves me nearly 4 pounds of wiggle room on top of that
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And so I'm not concerned. That supports as much as what I need it to support
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And so overall, that works actually surprisingly well. Now on the actual ball head itself you have one knob that allows you to do as I doing to just kind of set your shooting position and then there a second knob that allows you to rotate around on a horizontal axis
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and so it's nice to have that kind of versatility there built into it as well. Now when it comes to
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stability there's a couple of things you might want to watch for. Number one this thing only
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weighs two and a half pounds and so if you have that combination that I described with those big
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filters on there, those things are like small windows and so they catch a lot of wind. So you're
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going to want to add some stability to help to hold it down because the tripod itself is so light
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Right now if you buy from B&H Photo, they will include this Oban STB10 and it's a, they call it
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a tripod hammock and basically all it does is it attaches to the three legs and then you can
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just put stuff in there. Whatever happens to be around, rocks, chunks of wood, gear, sand
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whatever. Take your shoes off and put them in there just to add some weight into it. Another
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thing that I've actually used as well is that it's got a spring-loaded clip at the bottom
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Just attach your backpack or your camera bag, whatever it is you happen to be carrying
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or something else, and so you can add on weight that way to help to stabilize everything. You can
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also remove the bottom feet from this and expose there are spike tips at the bottom and so that can
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help also to if you've got a soft surface to actually dig it in and to ground it in that way
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There's three different locking angles. On top of that you can also reverse the center column if you
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want to shoot in a lower position and on top of that you can unscrew one of the legs and attach it
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to the center column and you have a monopod if you want to have that along. Another thing that
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I've actually found surprisingly nice for my kind of review type work is that sometimes I want to get
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very low and I'm not always crazy about the reversing the center column and shooting upside
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down. This can actually go to a minimum height of only 8.6 inches. That's under 22 centimeters
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which is quite low. And so it allows you to get down for shooting flowers or other things that
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are lower to the ground. And that in itself I find is quite handy as well. Now to highlight just a
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couple of things that I'm less crazy about. You know, I do like the fact that it's got a quick
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release plate here. And I do like the fact that it's got a ring that can loosen up or raise up to
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where you can finger tighten it. So you don't need any kind of tools. What I do find is because
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everything is kind of small, the edges of this tightening ring, they're a little bit sharper than
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what I like And so when you put a lot of pressure on them it almost feels like it cutting into your skin Although it doesn actually do that It just it it cuts in a little bit more than what I would like So I like if that was a little bit more rounded The other thing is that while everything small of course so while there is
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a bubble level here, you know, right now I've got a lens with a tripod ring on here so I can still
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see it. But under many situations, you're going to have just the camera body itself attached to
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the quick release plate and as soon as you do that and you put the camera on there the bubble
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level disappears and so it's not always all that useful but really there's those are fairly minor
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quibbles i found that the system just works quite well and it's very easy to once you kind of get
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the hang of everything it's very easy to to disassemble it all and so and you know you kind
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of learned by feel. I wasn't crazy about these twist locks at first, but I kind of developed a
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feel for them. And as you can see here for both the primary loosening or tightening, if you have
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decent size hands as I do, you can actually, you know, do that last step. You can tighten them all
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at the same time, which is kind of nice. And so it just helps with the overall speed of doing that
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And then, you know, you just use the locks, reverse those legs and, you know, very quickly
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you're back to a very compact package and then I'd clip that under the backpack or if you want to
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use they have it includes a nice zippered carry case and so you can also bring it along in that
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way I don't often use the carry cases themselves because usually I'm using something like this
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attached to the actual backpack I'm using for photography but overall I really liked it on the
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trip the fact that it's carbon fiber and it's light and it gets so compact makes it very handy
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for the kind of thing that I wanted to do. Now the full retail price on the Oban CT3535 with the
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ball head is $299 at B&H Photo but you'll find that a lot of times it's on sale for a good bit
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less than that so keep an eye out for a deal. I'll throw a link down below if you'd like to shop for
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one yourself and beyond that you can find a link to my written review. I'll also throw a link of
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some of the photos that I took on this trip to the Southwest. If you'd like to see those on my
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website, you could sign up for my newsletter. And of course, if you haven't already, please
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click that subscribe button. Thanks for watching. Have a great day
