First Look: YC Onion Taka – YC Onion’s first tripod for photographers
Sep 18, 2024
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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YC Onion has become a familiar and trusted name when it comes to camera sliders and motion control over the last few years. Lately, the company’s been looking to put cameras on their equipment when it’s stationary, too. So, they’ve been branching out into tripods.
Their latest is the YC Onion Tako tripod. Unlike much of YC Onion’s past equipment, this is tailored towards photographers rather than filmmakers. But it brings with it some unique features. Like self-locking and unlocking legs.
YC Onion Tako – Coming soon…
The tripod isn’t available just yet. We got to have a sneak peek of it while we were at IBC 2024 in Amsterdam this month. It’s a very interesting-looking tripod, which YC Onion says only exists because customers were asking for it. Customers wanted smaller tripods, and now they have one.
Well, soon they’ll have one. The company says they’re not looking to release it until November or December, so you have a bit of a wait. But the price sounds very attractive at “around $300”. And for this money, you get what appears to be a very nice tripod setup.
It features a single lock mechanism to fully loosen each leg. But each leg is also always in a semi-locked state. You can make the legs longer, by pulling more of each segment out, but you can’t push them in again. This lets you quickly raise your tripod in the field without having to lock everything. When you rest back down on the legs, they don’t shorten again.
This reminds me of the mechanism inside the now-retired Manfrotto 685B Neotec Monopod. To this day, the 685B is still my favourite monopod due to that leg design. To see a similar mechanism in a tripod makes me very excited. And at this price, I think it’ll be worth me getting one just to see how it compares against the twist-lock Gitzo Legende for convenience and practicality.
But first, we have to wait until they’re available to buy!
Price and Availability
The YC Onion Tako Tripod will be available to purchase in November or December for a price of around $300. We’ll keep you updated if we hear anything more concrete than that.
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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