I've been interested in a motorized pan/tilt solution for a while and finally sprung for the Bescor MP-101. It handles the XH A1 well, but you probably wouldn't want to put anything much heavier on it.

There's a more detailed writeup on my blog here (http://brucesharpe.blogspot.com/2007/06/no-more-shaky-pans.html) with links to some sample video taken with it.

The fast pan looks pretty awful, but that's not the fault of the Bescor. They are much smoother before compression. I need to practice a bit more, but I wouldn't do a pan as extreme as the ones shown in the video in any case. (More discussion of bad-looking pans from the A1 here.)

Bruce

I appreciate the review... I think I had rather put $130 towards a fluid head tripod set up.... I am sure it has good applications like a one man three camera wedding set up with preset positions...

Thank you for the review! It's great to see an example of this head in action since I am considering it. I assume your example .mov is highly compressed for web delivery.

For what it is worth, I have never seen that much artifacting from my Sony HDV FX1 (1080i) in the native as-recorded HDV, even with faster pans. If I compress the video to a low bitrate, of course I do get artifacts. In addition to the blurry, patchy quality, on my computer, the motion of your PanTilt.mov example has a regular "hiccup" every 1 second which I assume is just my computer not being fast enough for smooth playback.

Looks like a nice item to have.