Heipi Travel Tripod: A Revolutionary Design?

Heipi is kickstarting a new tripod and I have to say this is probably the most interesting design I’ve seen in a while.

This video explained it quite explicitly. I’ll just steal some screenshots from it:

Traditional tripod with central column: the central column wastes a lot of space and makes the tripod a lot bigger.

Traditional tripod without a central column: obviously more compact but loses ~20cm height which is crucial.

So Peak Design enters the game with their “irregular-shape” tripod to have the best of both worlds. It made a big fuss and start a new trend, now we also have Marsace (马小路）and Ulanzi（优篮子）and maybe some others copy-pasting their design.

Heipi steps it up further and makes a “three-pillar” central column. They basically replaced the central column with a mini-tripod, which can also be used separately.

Given that it is effectively much “thicker” than a traditional central column, in theory this is probably the sturdiest central column in its weight class. And there are reviewers saying the real-world performance is better than his Gitzo.

From an engineer’s perspective this is absolutely genius. Salute. There are some other stuff worth praising. The 50mm ballhead is visibly larger than most of the competitors in the travel tripod category so we can cautiously expect it to be more stable. The 5-section leg has a minimum diameter of 14mm which is basically on par with many 4-section tripods. So it looks like this tripod is really doing everything to ensure the stability. The ballhead has a quick release mechanism to quickly set up the camera. It also has a hidden smartphone clamp inside which is definitely a welcome feature in my opinion.

So here is a quick comparison with the popular Gitzo GT1545T/my Gitzo GT1544T and the new hotshot Ulanzi Zero Y/F38 tripod that every youtuber is talking about. Peak Design is eliminated due to various stupid not-so-peak designs.

	Heipi	1545	1544	Ulanzi
Weight total, KG	1.35	NA	NA	1.1
Weight w/o ballhead, KG	1.07	1.05	0.98	NA
Height (fully extended), mm (Gitzo’s using an 8cm ballhead)	1500	1610	1500	1590
Height w/o central column, mm (Gitzo’s using an 8cm ballhead)	1260	1380	1245	1340
Folded length, mm	445	425	425	425
Folded diameter, mm	69	110	110	67
Leg sections	5	4	4	5
Leg diameter, max-min, mm	26-12	25.3-14.8	25.3-14.7	26-14
Leg angle	20	22	25.4	25.4

First of all… the 20 degrees leg angle of the Ulanzi is absolutely horrifying. I still keep a Sirui T025X to do some non-photogaphy stuff, and I thought its 21 degrees leg angle is already the worst you can get on the market. This is how you destroy your equipment. I lost a Sony E10-18 because of it and there were some other incidents with less damage. Never happened to a Gitzo. So just a warning, stay away from it.

It’s a stupid design choice because some simple calculation will tell you that Ulanzi loses probably only 5cm if they change it to 25.4 degrees (cos(20)/cos(25.4)=1.04 so 4% gain), but the safety is going to be substantially improved (sin(25.4)/sin(20)=1.25 so 25% gain). I understand that the manufacturer did this because most people tend to ignore the leg angle parameter but it’s really not worth it for just 5cm. It’s not a dick contest where 5cm absolutely matters.

The Heipi’s 22 degrees angle is at least acceptable (pretty standard nowadays). The spec sheet looks quite similar to a Gitzo GT1545T. But you can see that the classic folded design is 10+ cm taller despite of the 4-section leg & a generous 25.4 degrees leg angle. Its 5-section sibling, GT1555T, can reach 1.46m height (including an 8 cm ballhead) with a 35.6cm folded length. For those non-folded design one obvious issue is that the height of the ballhead is going to impact the folded length. Peak Design/Ulanzi/Marsace all have compact ballheads to keep the total length in check. Heipi is taking quite a lot of penalty for using a strong ballhead. Gitzo just don’t care unless your ballhead is too big/tall. Their own ballhead is around 11cm tall which boost the total height to 164cm. The major weakness of Gitzo is that the folded diameter is 11cm, but I have to say unless the packed size is extremely crucial for you, the classic folded design actually still makes a lot of sense.

Anyway the Heipi is going to be much cheaper than a Gitzo, and it’s probably more stable (which is not an easy task based on TheCentralColumn’s database!), with a bunch of nice features, so it sounds like a good buy. But if you’re located in China then please don’t rush to KickStarter to place you bid just because it’s $100 cheaper than the so-called “market price”. Heipi is actually a Chinese company so I’m highly confident that when it hits Taobao/JD it’s probably going to be cheaper than the early-bird price. Be patient and wait for the reviews first.