Benro 3-Way Geared Head (GD3WH)

Purchased for real estate photography. Huge improvement for setting camera for pics. How did we live without this before. Wow. So easy to adjust.

This mount is awesome! I can use my Nikon P1000 to lock onto planets and get steady shots. With my other mounts it’s way too hard to fine adjust at full zoom and have the target still on the screen. I’ve gotten lots of astrophotography shots once I got this mount, before that the moon and sun were the only sky shots I could get. Got the blood moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and plenty of other space targets. The pictures I’m sharing are shot with only a Nikon Camera, no scope. Jupiter required a steady 30 second video to stack frames from and this mount held nice n steady. Any other mounts would have been shaky and not as centered

Very nice geared tripod head!! Very nice design by the engineers at Benro! Looking forward to using it for my macro photography. The first camera I placed on the head was an 8 x 10 Intrepid camera. I loved the quick adjustments, but loved the fine adjustments also!!

Solid very well-constructed geared head! The quick-release mechanism is a little hard to use, but the tradeoff is a solid head with no play at all.

My other ‘older’ geared head is a Manafrotto head, which has proved to loosen internally over times, several times even after being fixed by the manufacturer. So instead of paying a nearly new price to have it repaired yet again, I thought I’d give Benro geared head a try. It is solidly made with good materials and is lighter than the Manafrotto head, but solid just the same. The knobs work fine for quick or small adjustments so there isn’t a problem there. However, there are two challenges with this head, which lowered my rating. 1) The bubble in the level on top is so small compared to the circle used to center it, that it is difficult to be dead on accurate. Even just a small tweak, depending on just your own eye to make a judgement on whether it is completely accurately centered can be off. It would have been SO EASY to make the bubble bigger so that it would be quite easy to exactly center the bubble within the circle. 2) The attachment screw on the underside of the plate, which is attached to the camera body works loose. THIS IS SERIOUS! Unless I notice that the camera is starting to wiggle, I’m afraid that my $5000 combination Canon 5DMII / 17mm TS lens will fall off. I shoot 3 homes per day and typically every morning when starting, I have to retighten the screw. I’d use something like Lock Tight on the threads, but then I’d have trouble removing it. Update: I’ve been using this head now for a long time, usually 5 days a week. Once I learned that hand tightening wasn’t enough, I use a screw driver or a tool with a flat edge to tighten the mounting screw. Now it only needs retightening about every 1 to 2 weeks. Upgraded the rating from 3 to 4 stars.

When I need stability, balance and just the right angle I use the Benro 3-Way Geared Head. This is a beast on my tripod and is more than easy to get the perfect shot. My photography demands I have the correct angle and right tilt and Benro has made this task so easy for me. I do Real Estate Photography and I take pride in having my vertices and horizontals perfect. I highly recommend the Benro 3-Way Geared Head.

I used this geared tripod head to photograph the total eclipse. It's much better than the original ball head or the video head for this application. With the geared head, I could make small, fine changes in aiming the camera to keep tracking the sun. In contrast, my video head is much better for making larger shifts and it tends to shift slightly when being resecured; and I feel that it's also harder to make the fine adjustments for tracking the sun. The Benro also has an Arca-Swiss clamp, and this matches well with my large lens, which has an Arca-Swiss compatible plate on its foot. Some of the other geared heads I looked at did not and might have required me to attach an adapter plate to the lens foot.

Got this and used it for the April 2024 eclipse. Might have been overkill, but it allowed me to make small adjustments to keep the eclipse centered onscreen (Sony R5) at the critical moments. I may use it again with a tripod when I attempt to use the R5 to scan old negatives. Will update this review when that happens. Overall, good quality and made my eclipse workflow easy.