All of Gitzo's 3-Series Carbon Fiber tripods are great, including the Gitzo GT3530LS Carbon Fiber Tripod I have been using for a long time. I picked up the Gitzo GT3541LS 6x Carbon Fiber Tripod specifically for its more compact retracted size.

The legs are OK but the head design is poor and the piece that is used to adjust the leg angle on the tripod had one already broken when I unpacked the tripod. It was a piece of cast metal which was a terrible choice for this part.

The bottom of thie center column has a o-ring that that prevents the cener column from rubbing and marring the three legs. The problem is, the o-ring keeps falling off, this happened twice in one day and once on another. Once outside, it took me an 1/2 hour to find the o-ring!!!

I use this tripod with a gimbal head, Tamron 150 - 600 mm lens and Canon Mark IIV body. It works well, and is nice and stable. However, the instructions with the tripod could be better. The instuctions have only a little written description and picture diagrams.

I bought the Gitzo 3542L tripod for use with my 500mm and 600mm lenses. It was OK with the 500mm but there was too much twisting and flexing with the16 lb. load with the 600mm f/4 lens (lens, gimbal, camera).

Like other reviewers here, I purchased this tripod to go with my RRS BH-55 full-sized ball head. I chose this model over a few of the others with it's size and capabilities, simply because I liked the newer clip design for spreading the legs over the old.

I'm going to use this tripod for landscape and long exposure photography. The easy to loosen legs are wonderful and the tripod is solid and light concidering how tall it is.

5 star tripod that should also include spiked feet that I had to buy separate.I own 3 other Gitzo tripods, the Series 5 carbon tripod 6-section, weekender and now the mountaineer to replace a heavier aluminum similar size that needed to be replaced.

I was upgrading from an older, aluminum, series 2 Reporter by Gitzo. I needed something taller and more stable. I bought this one and I also temporarily bought a series 4 systematic to compare it to. I returned the series 4 systematic because it was simply too large for me to travel with.

Great pack able tripod capable of supporting longer lenses!

Excellent. Best ever. Couldn't work without it.