What is up nerds welcome back thank you so much for joining me again my name is Nate in the wild as always so listen like any true nerd i have a lot of nerd friends and my favorite nerd friends are the ones at Colorado tripod company you remember them from light side up they were the guys who helped me design and manufacture the stabilization system that ended up helping us carry our stratospheric payload all the way up to 120 thousand feet well those nerds have been getting super nerdy and they gifted me a sneak peek at one of their newest products and it is so freaking cool i figured i had to do an entire video on it it is worth mentioning that they didn't pay me to do this video in fact they didn't even ask me to talk about it they just gave me this ball head to try out for fun and i love it so much that i figured i had to tell everybody about it so that said the link below is an affiliate link so if you pick one up it would be incredible if you use that link when you buy it so that i can continue to make videos about rad brand new camera gear instead of having to get a real job so without further ado let's get into it so this beautiful little duhickey here is called the Aspen ball head and while this might look super bizarre right now i feel confident saying that in the next three to five years this will be the industry standard for how ball heads are designed it is incredible there's so much thought put into this that i honestly can't believe it's taken so long to get here the list of pros is absolutely outrageous and i honestly didn't find a single con other than you know maybe it looks a little big but as we'll discuss the size is purely volume because it's shockingly lightweight as well so for features this thing has an insane range of motion literally can spin your camera fully in circles on the top as well as on either side you can put your camera in portrait mode and do a full 360 that way if you want it is by far the least restrictive ball head i've ever seen in my entire life and of course the coolest option is that you aren't limited to a single little slot on the side for portrait orientation shots which is kind of the standard for a lot of ball heads you can flip your camera over to the side and then you still have a substantial range of motion for recomposing and this is a huge benefit for me because i hate getting my camera flip to the side and then realizing i have to move my tripod legs to get the composition i want also cool is that you can go beyond 90 degrees on either side which allows really unique compositions and you can even shoot straight down with a standard tripod now for unique lay flat shots if you're a studio photographer one of the ways they reduced weight on this is that the ball is completely hollow plus it has additional material removed via this cool hole pattern the hollow ball reduces ball weight by over 50% and this is fantastic if like me you're sick of walking around with such heavy balls all the time the lever clamp is adjustable and it's compatible with archipelites and elevackets from all manufacturers archipelites are supposed to be industry standardized but there's a millimeter or two variants between manufacturers so it's really nice that they put this little adjustment knob on here so that you don't have to buy you know their brand of archipelate or think about which one's attached to your camera the locking knob on the side is user replaceable so if you're like me and inevitably do something dumb to your equipment you don't have to pay for shipping and professional repairs you just take care of it in your home there is also a dedicated friction knob here so you can control and adjust the tension for all of this for fine tuned movements i mean how often if you've been out and you release the locking knob on your ball head and the camera just completely flops over to the side i like this friction knob because you can set it to have a minimum amount of friction so no matter how loose you crank on this locking knob your your camera will still have a little bit of resistance and it will prevent it from just flopping over and last but not least this last knob here is for locking up panning drift this is awesome for getting the tripod level and then panning left to right for panoramas or you can just lock it out completely to avoid drift all together now strength wise this sucker is strong they have it listed at a 30 pound payload capacity on the website and while i didn't actually hook this up to a load cell i did put a fully extended 100 to 400 on it mounted on the camera plate rather than the lens shoe and it held this with plenty of strength to spare you can even see mounting my 42 inch rhino slider on the far left side still wasn't enough to loosen this ball head i considered showing off and putting my 400 millimeter f2.8 on the camera and mounting it on here but i'm genuinely worried that the camera mount plate will break before the tripod it gives in so while i didn't find the absolute strength limit of the ball head i can say with 100% certainty it's strong enough for anything you need to do unless you're genuinely doing something risky for the rest of your equipment also as for weight the entire thing only weighs 440 grams which is actually one third the weight of a comparable ball head with a similar load capacity from an unnamed competitor so less than one pound like i said the only downside i can see here is that volumetrically it's a little big but that's an extremely minor issue in my mind since weight is really the limiting factor for things like airplanes and hiking volume doesn't really come into play that much and while it might look a little bit big it is you know compared to a normal ball head a traditional ball head of this size and weight capacity this is actually 66% lighter than the competitors this is like i said my only ball head that i'm going to use for future projects i actually got like sad to take it off my tripod so i could have it on the desk here to film this video this is definitely the ball head i'm going to be using in the future thank you so much for watching this please let me know what you think down in the comments below i'd love to get some more feedback on this thing and as i said the link is down there as well as always my name is Nate and wild thank you again so much for being here stay nerdy my friends