Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsVery nice for landscape orientation, or with different tripod for portrait orientation
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2011
Nice mini-tripod; but, as I suspected by looking at the pictures before I ordered it, it is not suitable for holding the cell phone in portrait orientation because it is off-balance with the phone hanging from the side. It will fall over with my iPhone4 in portrait mode. For landscape orientation, with the phone directly above the tripod, it is fine.
The clamp arm that goes across the width of the phone is spring-loaded and expands from 46 mm to 60 mm (1 13/16 in to 2 3/8 in). This easily fits an iPhone 4 without a case, which is 58 mm wide. With my case, the iPhone is 61 mm wide, so it is a squeeze on the case and on the rubber pads at both sides of the clamp with the case on; I will be taking the case off when I use this. The long dimension of the holder, which is not critical since the phone can stick out the open end, goes from 72 mm to 87 mm (2 7/8 in to 3 1/2 in). The minimum distance between the end of the holder and the clamp is 46 mm (1 7/8 in) The legs extend from 4 1/4 in to 6 5/8 in, but even fully extended, with the wider support base that provides, the tripod will tip over with the phone off to the side in portrait orientation.
The legs are oriented so that when the holder is in portrait orientation, the holder hangs between two of the legs. I loosened the screw holding the legs and rotated them so the holder was above one leg to try to make portrait orientation stable. Then the holder bumps into the leg and cannot go fully portrait, so I rotated the legs until the holder in portrait orientation could just fit next to a leg. This was stable, but just barely so, and it would not take much shaking to have it fall over, so I put the legs back to the original position and will not use this tripod for portrait orientation.
The packaging the tripod came in says this is model S2120W and there is also a picture of a model S2135W that has legs that spread much wider, but it looks like those legs are shorter, so that tripod may have the same instability problem for portrait orientation.
The camera holder is attached to the tripod by a standard camera tripod 1/4-20 screw. The screw is only long enough to engage a little less than 1 1/4 threads of the screw into the camera holder, which is probably adequate for such lightweight use here, but the camera holder is thick enough that they could have used a longer screw. This screw cannot be changed because it is part of the ball-joint, but it would be possible to thin down the tightening disk on the screw. That disk is 1/4 inch thick, so 1/16 in could be taken off it, which would expose more of the screw thread, allowing 2 1/2 threads into the holder.
As long as you only want to use this for landscape orientation, this tripod should do fine.
Or if you want to use the camera holder with a different tripod that has a wider support base, then you can use it for portrait orientation.
