I sold Questar the Linhof tripods that they sold. When they were looking for a new tripod they invited me to their factory in New Hope to bring tripods out for their tests.
The test that convinced them to sell both the HD Pro and the ProfiPort models involved taking them outside and setting them up on a concrete slab with their big telescopes mounted on it. They then had an extremely large employee stand next to the tripod, he had to be well over 300 pounds, and while an engineer looked through the eyepiece the large guy jumped up and down very close to the tripod. The engineer was looking to see how much the scope vibrated. He did not hold or have his eye or face in direct contact with the scope while observing.
There was no movement whatsoever!
They also had other tripods lined up for this test from Gitzo, Majestic, Davis & Sandford, Manfrotto, Foba, etc.
The HD Pro was the only one with no vibration at all transmitted to the scope.
We kind of knew that this would be the outcome as we had been selling the HD Pro to major art museums to hold very heavy IR video cameras that they used to scan old paintings to observe what, if anything, was painted under the surface. To do this they needed a non vibrating tripod but with it they had to have a center column that did not move the camera side to side while elevating it and a macro slider that did not move the camera up and down while panning from side to side. Only the Linhof passed this test and we had a special package made up for these art museums. The only part that had to be specially made was the slider. It normally had a rail about 8" long that could move side to side. That rail was actually a short section from a Kardan JBL camera so we had the factory use instead the standard JBL rail that was 18" long.
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