Bottom line, if you think the right tripod is too expensive, you aren't ready for a tripod and anything you buy for $50, $100, $200 and maybe even $300 may not really serve your purposes. Getting a cheap, inadequate tripod is throwing money into the toilet, or worse, putting your gear at risk when it fails and your camera crashes to the ground.

If your needs are modest, like you only want to use it for landscape stuff with a normal to wide lens, you can get by with a lighter-duty tripod. If you a using any lens at high magnification, say 1:5 or up to 1:1, then you need to get the burlier tripod. Hogan's guidance on using top tube diameter as a guide to determining a tripod's stability is exactly how it's done. I use a tripod with a 37mm top tube for 600mm and macro, and a tripod with a 28mm top tube for landscape, close up, long exposures with shorter lenses. My big tripod cost me $525, and the smaller one was $310 - both without heads. If you think this is still too costly, you need to re-think the whole tripod thing.

Cheaper tripods will only add to the cost of the correct tripod later. And you will never hear someone complaining they bought "too much tripod" but you will see pages and pages of articles on how to make inadequate tripods more adequate. The advice ranges from using mirror lockup, shutter delay, remote shutter release, hanging a weight from the hook under the camera platform, etc. Those measures will help somewhat, but most will not dampen shutter vibration, the principal cause of loss of sharpness when you shoot between 1/25 and 1/200 second. Only a well-designed and adequate tripod will help that. Thick legs = stability. Load capacity, tripod weight, metal vs carbon - none of this matters and should not be used as criteria for tripod selection.

Bottom line, if you think the right tripod is too expensive, you aren't ready for a tripod and anything you buy for $50, $100, $200 and maybe even $300 may not really serve your purposes. Getting a cheap, inadequate tripod is throwing money into the toilet, or worse, putting your gear at risk when it fails and your camera crashes to the ground.

If your needs are modest, like you only want to use it for landscape stuff with a normal to wide lens, you can get by with a lighter-duty tripod. If you a using any lens at high magnification, say 1:5 or up to 1:1, then you need to get the burlier tripod. Hogan's guidance on using top tube diameter as a guide to determining a tripod's stability is exactly how it's done. I use a tripod with a 37mm top tube for 600mm and macro, and a tripod with a 28mm top tube for landscape, close up, long exposures with shorter lenses. My big tripod cost me $525, and the smaller one was $310 - both without heads. If you think this is still too costly, you need to re-think the whole tripod thing.

Cheaper tripods will only add to the cost of the correct tripod later. And you will never hear someone complaining they bought "too much tripod" but you will see pages and pages of articles on how to make inadequate tripods more adequate. The advice ranges from using mirror lockup, shutter delay, remote shutter release, hanging a weight from the hook under the camera platform, etc. Those measures will help somewhat, but most will not dampen shutter vibration, the principal cause of loss of sharpness when you shoot between 1/25 and 1/200 second. Only a well-designed and adequate tripod will help that. Thick legs = stability. Load capacity, tripod weight, metal vs carbon - none of this matters and should not be used as criteria for tripod selection.