tabletop and travel

For the price at Amazon it's a great buy! The build and design is extremely good considering it's under $20. This is a COMPACT tripod as another reviewer has noted, and is for light weight cameras/spotting scopes only. For most of us a 2-way pan head is fine - I wouldn't buy this as my one-and-only tripod, it's for when you want a tripod that's light weight and doesn't take up space yet is still reasonably steady if you don't overload it. I've bought a lot worse tripods for more than double the price!

I'm planning to put a bit of silicone grease on the two axes to make it pan a bit more smoothly. Other than that, this tripod is a great value for the price, I'm glad I bought it.

The Compact SXL is designed as exactly that- a COMPACT tripod. Sunpak has many larger models, but this one is intended to be compact & portable. The U212D Slik is a much heavier, less portable tripod & is not a comparable model.

This tripod does not have have any defects as such but unfortunately does not prove useful for most photography requirements. It can only be extended to around 43 inches or so. From, my experience one needs at least 60 inch tripods to take pictures of people or interesting sceneries. Moreover, it can pan only in two directions, so this tripod does not help while taking vertical photographs.

While purchasing a tripod look for these two main features
- 3-dimensional panning, you'll need to turn the camera around both in x, y and z axis.
- Also one that can be extended to atleast 60 inches.
Trust me, you really need these features, if you are looking forward to serious photography.

On the brighter side, this tripod is extremely light-weight and easy to carry around. But then the purpose of the tripod is to help in taking pictures, which this one is unable to.