Tilta 10 inches Pro Articulating Arm with Strong Payload and Quick Locking - Black TA-PAA2-B

This product does NOT fit on any SmallRig nato rail products, including their standard nato mounts, their slim nato mounts, the nato rails built into their cages, or the nato rails built into their suction mounts. This product is absolutely useless if you would like to use it alongside any SmallRig nato product. Infuriating, as this is for a shoot tomorrow, and I will now not be able to achieve certain shots due to this. Quite unbelievable as I thought nato rails / clamps were a standardised system.

This arm is fantastic. Much more solid build than the others I have purchased. The toothed design make setting the desired postion really stable!

PROS -super solid, calling it “heavy duty” would be fair -holds a lot of weight -locating pins at both ends, so zero chance of twisting -really nicely machined, up to Tilta’s excellent standards -the butterfly thumb screw is nicely designed, easy to use and very comfortable. -thumb-screws for the 1/4”-20 screw are a great size with good knurling. -at £49 (with a 10% promo code) at the time of this review, I think that this offers very good value. CONS -surfaces of the two ball joints is a bit rough, because of that, the movement of the ball joints isn’t very smooth. I can see CNC marks on the balls themselves, they could have been smoothed to a higher degree (to meet those high Tilta standards). -pretty heavy for a small magic arm (but then, it’s “heavy duty”) -some of my cages don’t always have locating holes to go with their 1/4”-20 holes, which limits this arm’s versatility. It would’ve been nice to be able to manually remove the locating pins. NOTES -one of the listing photos states: “multiple mounting options…”. Not sure what that means, it attaches by a 1/4”-20 bolt (with locating pins), but won’t attach anywhere else. -I prefer my magic arms to _not_ have teeth in the central joint (I have one, smaller than this one, that can hold the same amount of weight but with an entirely smooth central joint, which gives it a bit more freedom of positioning. It cost 2.5x as much though). MY STAR RATINGS: 1* substandard, mostly cons 2** barely acceptable, cons outweigh the pros 3*** meets the basic requirements, cons balance the pros 4**** good product, pros outweigh the cons 5***** exceptional, all (or almost all) pros