Acadalus, The $5,000 Self-Leveling Tripod Head
Posted in: Accessories and Peripherals, Today's Chili
Dr. Carl Koch was sick of fiddling with his tripod to get his camera level, so he spent the next four years inventing and designing the Acadalus, a self-leveling tripod head. Instead of adjusting knobs and levers until the little spirit-level bubble sits obediently between its lines, you just pop the camera onto the Acadalus and wait a couple seconds.
Modeled on an airplane flight-simulator, an inclinometer measures just where the head is and then uses stepper-motors to acquire a level-plane. Further adjustment can be made manually by using the D-pad like buttons on the side.
The Acadalus can be used in the studio, plugged into the mains, or you can hook up the 2800 mAH 18.5 V lithium ion battery which should last you for a day of shooting (or two hours of continual use if you are, we suppose, on a ship yawing and rolling in a stormy sea).
So how much is this five-pound, Swiss-made behemoth? A whopping $5,000 for the studio kit, plus another $500 if you want the battery and charger. If you need both the power cable and the battery option, you’re looking at yet another $100, nickel-and-diming you up to $5,600. No wonder the PDN article which led us to the Acadalus shows it supporting the Leica S2, a camera that costs $26,000 body-only.
I don’t know about you, but I’d be willing to spend a lot of hours in Lightroom using the crop tool to level my drunken, off-kilter snaps before I’d drop this cash, but I imagine that there may be somebody out there who really, really needs a level camera. Good luck if your subject is wonky, though.
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