Kaidan QuickPan Professional Spherical review

Panoramic photography is a relatively niche part of the creative industry, but it's increasingly used to create compelling, attention-grabbing imagery.

Kaidan is a name that is well known as a manufacturer of panoramic tripod heads, the equipment necessary to take photos that can be stitched together seamlessly, without awkward shifts or overlaps that don't match. Its QuickPan Professional Spherical is the company's flagship product, a panoramic head that can be used with wide-angle or fisheye lenses to create spherical interactive panoramic photos as well as ultra-high-resolution multi-row panoramas with longer telephoto lenses.

When you first use the QuickPan, you'll need to spend some time setting it up for your camera and lens. You will have to find the position for both the rotator base arm and the upper arm that rotates the lens around its 'nodal point', or optical centre. This is essential to avoid having parallax shift errors in overlapping parts of adjacent shots, but it can take a little work. Once these two points are found, wedge-stops can be locked down so you can place the camera back into place easily from then on. Both arms have measurements in millimetres and inches, so you can make a note of the precise final positions, although there's no table of camera body and lens combinations to help you get started.

The maximum weight this is designed to carry is 9kg, which is more than enough for most people - even a full-frame sensor digital SLR with a large telephoto lens will fall within this limit. You can attach any camera with a tripod mount to the head, but it would be overkill to use it with a pocket-sized compact digital camera.

A bubble level attached to the base helps when adjusting your tripod, and it comes with a 1/4in as well as 3/8in tripod mount. The rotator 'click stops' are rock solid, being made with a sprung lever and deep slots. The horizontal arm rotates and locks in a similar way, although a rubber ring replaces the spring. When your camera is mounted it is easy to disengage and turn to the next stop with a single hand. The model we tested came with a 12-stop 'indexing hub' rotator base, suitable for focal lengths up to around 30-40mm, but a number of others can be ordered instead.

The QuickPan is a precise, highly-engineered bit of kit. However, it is certainly not the cheapest panoramic head on the market, and it is undeniably large and, at 2.24kg, moderately heavy, so it can be awkward to carry to remote locations. It has been engineered for strength and function, and it satisfies those demands admirably - but we have to add that it isn't the most elegant or portable bit of kit you could buy.

This isn't aimed at the estate agent 'virtual tour' market; that's better served with a one-shot lens attachment such as Kaidan's 360One VR. This is for serious amateur or professional photographers, who want to do high-resolution panoramic work, whether for full-screen interactive display or for large-format print work. It's tough and precise and it does the job well, but the bulk is something to consider.