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Old 07-05-2009, 04:46 AM
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inkista inkista is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: San Diego, CA
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Hartblei's made several versions of their super-rotators. The Arsat ones are still relatively inexpensive on eBay, but some of the super-rotators are no longer cheap, alas. And the ones with Zeiss glass in them are astronomically priced and impossible to find.

I'm not 100% sure, but I'd check whether the cheap Arsat can actually rotate tilt and shift independently of each other. I think an older version had a fixed angle of 90° between tilt and shift. And one of the main attractions for me of the Super-Rotator I bought (aside from the price of $400 I found three years ago; I think now it goes for around $850) was its ability to rotate tilt and shift 360° independently of each other--even the Canon TS-Es couldn't do that back then (I think the new TS-E 17 and TS-E 24 II can do something similar now, not sure about the Nikon tilt-shifts).

Mine is the older knobby version. Big and fugly as hell.

Tilt Up
And the glass is nothing to write home about--relatively low contrast, and a yellow color cast. But it is fun to use.

toy wedding shoot
8° tilt up.

Your biggest problem finding one is that they're mostly sold on eBay. I know of only one online dealer that regularly offers them, and I have no idea how reputable they are.

Your second biggest problem is that the widest you're going to find is 35mm--which isn't particularly wide on a crop body. So, if you were planning on using it for architecture or faking miniature shots, it may not be as nice as you'd like. I got the 80 mostly because I was planning on using it for macro and landscape photography, to get a bit more DoF. But I do find myself often using it to make fake miniature shots--it's so much easier to reduce the DoF than to extend it. Mastering tilt will take you longer than you think it will. I don't use shift for perspective correction on architecture shots as often as I use it for composition; 80mm on a crop body is just too long to get good architecture shots.
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Last edited by inkista; 07-05-2009 at 04:52 AM.
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