Hello All,
I've got a 70-200 f/4 L and I wanted to get the tripod ring for it so I can use my Alien Bees Ringflash without the lens sticking out the front.
As we're all aware, Canon's ring costs about $150 from most of the reputable online retailers. Ebay has a handful of retailers that offer rings between $16 and $40.
Is the reason that these are so much cheaper, because they're likely to fail whereas the Canon brand wont?
Do any of you have any experience with the third party tripod rings?
The 70-200/4 is light enough that it does not require a ring so if you buy a knock off ring it should not be so stressed as to fail unless you put undue pressure on it.
However I would not get a knock off ring for any of the big whites as thats just too much money reliant on a piece of metal (you hope) that you have no idea of the manufacture process or a guarantee from a reputable manufacturer.
All lumps of metal are not equal. Paying for the canon one you at least have some guarantee that they didn't make it out of cheap cast steel full of defects. Buying an aftermarket one you have no such guarantee - it might be good, it might not be. It might even be identical to the canon one, having been made on the same production line and smuggled out the back of the factory. You just don't know.
Buy the generic one, Canon's price for theirs is absolutely absurd. Dont buy the line of BS some people here will lead you to believe about the canon one being superior, truth be known they are made by the same Chinese guy, one just does not say Canon on it.
My father and I both had a 70-200 f4. He got the Canon mount, I got the $40 one. His was white, mine was black. They looked identical. Same hinge pin and all. NO WAY would I buy the $150 one. A side question, does the same one work for the f4 IS version? (I sold the non-IS lens, but kept the mount)
I'd only be using it to attach my AlienBees Ringflash to my setup so the lens doesn't stick out beyond the end of it. As long as it will support that then I'm fine. I'd never trust a $10 item to support $3000 worth of photo gear on a tripod.
I actually just found one on the B/S forum. I just couldn't bring myself to trust even an ABR800 on a generic ring. I read some other reviews online and most people said that the generic rings worked but were a bit flimsy and, like Dawei Ye said, tended to scratch the lens barrel due to insufficient cushioning, poor fit, etc.
My luck would be that the ring would fail and I'd end up breaking something...
The one I bought is not flimsy, its metal and has a padded inner diameter just like Canons which does not scratch the lens body. I guess you have to step up to the ~20$ and not buy the ~7$ one. But at any rate $150 is highway robbery and the snobbery here amazes me
The one I bought is not flimsy, its metal and has a padded inner diameter just like Canons which does not scratch the lens body. I guess you have to step up to the ~20$ and not buy the ~7$ one. But at any rate $150 is highway robbery and the snobbery here amazes me
troy12n wrote:
The one I bought is not flimsy, its metal and has a padded inner diameter just like Canons which does not scratch the lens body. I guess you have to step up to the ~20$ and not buy the ~7$ one. But at any rate $150 is highway robbery and the snobbery here amazes me
Buying genuine parts is not snobbery: Dawei has direct experience of a mount that he rates as a waste of 20 dollars. I have a PhD in materials science and my work has involved breaking enough stuff to understand the difference between a cheap bit of metal and an expensive one. I don't disagree that the Canon mounts are overpriced (and should really be bundled with the lens), but i do think that trusting a 1200 dollar lens (plus attached camera) to a 20 dollar ring is asking for trouble. This is not snobbery, just common sense. Besides, the genuine rings hold their value well, so they aren't really a bad investment.
I read lots of good things on the net about the generic rings after posting this here. Then I also read lots of bad things about the generic rings. I couldn't find any one specific eBay store with a reliable product so I just kept my eyes open for a used Canon brand ring and was lucky enough to stumble on one for $110 on the B/S forum. Still a lot of money, but also luckily for me, I had sold a lens that morning for just under that so it was kind of a wash for me.
I'm not being snobby about which ring to use, but it would be more expensive to replace my 70-200 f/4 L and Canon 5D with grip should the generic ring fail.
My dad is an engineer and I asked him what he thought about it and he said that he'd have to see both and do a stress test on both to see which was the better piece. He did say though that if it was made in a mold, temperature, raw materials, cooling times, etc. could change the metal's resilience to failure. Those are big variables and if not tightly controlled could result in a failure. I'm just talking from an engineer's standpoint here...
