Is the ( Really Right Stuff) RRS BH 40 ball head worth the money?

Quick background.  Ball heads are an essential part of the tripod equation if you need to steady your camera for landscape, long exposure or portrait work.  Really Right Stuff (RRS) established a reputation for their ball-heads as the best there is amongst the web-based photography pundits.  They cost a small fortune, and don’t look wildly different from any other competitive heads.  So are they really better?

Well here we get into the ‘audiophile mains cable’ (or power cord) arena.  When I was interested in hifi, I was always amused by the reviews of audiophile power cords, which could cost several hundred pounds, and claimed to deliver mains electricity better to your high-end hifi than a normal cable.  Reviewers would write about the ‘improved sound stage’ and ‘crispness of the high-end’ with these cables.  All b*llocks of course.  No way could you detect any difference by changing the power cable in a hi-fi system, and the lack of blind testing of this or any other component of hi-fi systems showed what hogwash it all was.

The same b*llsh*t applies to much in the photography accessory arena.  Camera sensors and lenses have a standardised set of tests from the likes of DxOlabs and Photozone, that allow true objective comparisions.  Not so in the case of tripods and accessories.  Most reviews are purely subjective, and reviewers are clearly swayed more by marketing than objectivity.  Those that do tests usually conduct them over a few (say 5-10) products, and don’t maintain a database.

But I have discovered an amazing German database of ball head tests from the excellent Traumflieger Fotographics (literally Dreamflyer Photography – go figure).  They have been testing ballheads since 2009 and so far have done 37 at all prices. So what are these tests?

The main requirement for a ball-head is that it can carry a reasonable load, doesn’t droop when a long lens is mounted, is easy and smooth to adjust camera position, and has reasonable damping of camera vibrations. Oh and ideally it needs to be low in weight as it has to be carried around. The Traumflieger chaps have objective, repeatable tests for all of these.  They are located here and are in German.  The easiest way to understand them if you are not a native speaker, is to use Google translate.  I have extracted their summary below – and translated the headings.  if you want to know how the tests were done, it’s in part I of the test report.

And what of the results?  In objective testing, the RRS-BH40 is only an average performer.  It comes 17th out of 37, and does pretty poorly in the droop tests.  It also costs 340 euros and weighs half a kilo.  What is the best ball head in the test?  This is the unpromisingly-named Tiltall BH-07, which costs only 99 euros, and destroys the RRS head in almost every category.  It also weighs half as much as the RRS.  You can get them from Amazon UK for £84 including delivery.  I ordered one, and it’s absolutely excellent. The table is useful for evaluating most other expensive and highly regarded makes of ball-head like Arca, Markins and Kirk.  Not surprisingly, these all do fairly poorly in objective tests. An abridged version of the results summary is shown below.  At the end of the table, is a picture of the test results for the RRS BH 40, showing the 8mm of droop (!) when a 4kg load is applied…….

RRS BH 40 test results

Note that ‘Testergebnis Nachsachen’ does not refer to scrotal dimensions, but to the amount of head droop experienced.  Quite a different thing.

 Tiltall BH 07 test results