Gitzo Center Ball Head Series 4 verdict
Summary
The Gitzo center Ball Head Series 4 (GH4383) is one serious ball head, with a massive 30kg payload and a base fatter than most tripod platforms. this three-knob design has a ball release lock, an adjustable friction knob and a fluild-damped pan axis – a nice touch. My sample has an Arca Swiss style plate with a locking lever (GH4383LR). It’s an impressive ball head, but unless you’re going to load up your tripod with a huge telephoto or a pro video rig, it’s overkill for most users.
For
Beautiful engineering and design
Smooth fluid panning axis
Massive construction and 30kg payload
Against
Friction knob has no end stop at the ‘loose’ setting
Too big for most tripods
This is the biggest ball head I’ve ever reviewed. It’s from Gitzo’s series 4 range, and it’s the largest made by Gitzo too. It’s designed for big telephoto lenses or perhaps pro cinema cameras, not the average DSLR or mirrorless camera.
It worked fine with my A7R II and Sony 24-105mm f/4, a weighty combination by mirrorless standards, but barely registering on the Gitzo’s weight scale. If this is the kind of kit you use then you would be spending way more than you need to on this Series 4 ball head. At £459 in the UK and $550, it costs more than most tripods – though not Gitzo tripods, of course.
Big as it is, this head handles lighter loads like mine perfectly smoothly, but what you’re paying for is heavy-duty engineering, not cutting edge design features or design flourishes.
Having said that, this is a very attractive head both to look at and to use. Gitzo’s trademark metallic crackle finish looks both durable and stylish, and the lever lock clamps down on the camera plate with an impressive firmness.
The plate itself fixes to the camera using a screw with a loop big enough to tighten it securely by hand, so there’s no need for any coins or hex keys, which makes a nice change.
There’s not much else to know. One one side of the ball head is the locking knob, which has a double-thickness grip so that you can identify it by touch. On the other side is a friction adjustment knob, which turns a little too freely for my liking and doesn’t have an end stop when you slacken it off – so you just keep on turning, wondering when to stop.
Below the ball is a separate, fluid-damped panning axis. The locking knob for this is a lot smaller than the other two for some reason, but at least it’s easy to identify. The panning action is indeed nice and smooth, but you’ll need to get your tripod base level first for that to be of much use.
It’s a shame that Gitzo hasn’t followed a design trend taken up by other tripod makers, of adding in second panning axis above the ball. That way, you could use the ball to get the panning base level – so much faster than fiddling with tripod legs.
As it happens, I used the Gitzo head with a 3 Legged Thing Nicky carbon fiber tripod – my only tripod on the same scale as the Gitzo head – and that had a levelling bowl fitted, so at a pinch the Gitzo ball head could be used for panning video work – but not for vertical pans, because there’s no independently lockable tilt axis.
Really, though, the Gitzo center Ball Head Series 4 feels designed primarily for stills photography with very heavy kit. It would take a very big telephoto to stretch its payload capacity, though, and at that point you might be looking at a gimbal head anyway rather than a ball head.
So the Gitzo center Ball Head Series 4 is a pretty specialised bit of kit that’s only going to suit photographers with that need a heavy-duty head that’s also compact and portable and quick to set up and use.