UPDATE:Since writing this review about the piece that broke which I fixed, the seller contacted me and offered me a partial refund which I accepted. I was not expecting this level of customer service and have upgraded to 4 stars because of this.The Good:Good quality right out of the box, and first impressions were good on how robust it is, how stiff the joints are, how tightly it can be locked off, and how versatile it is at maneuvering into any position you care to think of.Overall, it is a pleasure to use, it looks nice, feels nice and is easy to set up. The foam grip is really nice to handle. The ball head locks off with a heavy DSLR nice an stable. The legs adjust in or out individually at any arbitrary angle from 0-180 degrees, but lock off at 4 separate fixed points for more stability with the spring loaded buttons at the top of each leg. It goes quite high and also pretty low, and if you flip it upside-down it goes that extra bit right down to the floor for macro photography or dramatic shots.The bag it comes with, with optional shoulder strap is very robust and padded, and would be suited to mountaineering. It's quite portable too. There is a sprung loaded clip on the bottom which you can hang a bag of shopping off of to keep it more sturdy in the wind if needs be. There is also a 360 spirit bubble on the head if anyone ever uses them.The panning is very useful for panoramic photo merges, because it has markers to follow for each shot, giving you a very consistent photo merge, at least that's the idea, which leads me into the bad....The bad:1. Upon only the second use, the pan head tightening screw, which is the smallest one, wasn't quite tightening up and locking it, so I gave it another good twist and the threads in the pan head stripped easily and the screw was now useless. Not only would it not tighten, but the whole head became loose and wobbly, and generally unusable, because the threads were way too shallow and easy to strip. Luckily I was able to use an M8 bolt to grind out new threads (it's only aluminium so was easy with a vice and spanner) and then use my 3D printer to print a new knob (bigger and easier to use this time) to hot glue on the hex head. After rounding off the tip of the bolt on my bench grinder this is a marked improvement on the original design as it takes less finger strength to lock it off now. It took me a whole morning to fix this, but I didn't want to have to send it all back.2. The panning does have another problem which could have cost me a new camera were I not able to catch it in time: If you try panning to the right while locked off (easy to do), it can force the head to unscrew from the base of the shaft, and this is a short bolt. If you don't notice it, the whole head can just fall off, as it nearly did before I caught it. One more thing to watch out for. I took it apart and moved the inner bolt further down and gave it more thread to grip to the shaft and used all my strength to force it tight so it doesn't easily do this again.3. There is one more thing with panning... the whole shaft sometimes wiggles with the pan, where you think you've locked off the shaft after raising/lowering it, but you need a bit more strength to really lock it off. I'm sure I'll just get used to having to do this though.4. The feet should be more dome shaped, since the angles of the legs allow you do ridiculous angles. It's okay on carpet, but the flat feet seem misplaced on this tripod when on a solid floor going at extreme angles.Overall, this is my 3rd tripod now, and is instantly my favourite, despite it's issues which I can overcome. I'm more pleased since I got it in Amazon lightning deals. My other tripods are more traditional, and very cheaply made. You can do a lot worse than this tripod, but then it also shows why there are more expensive ones on the market.