Well whispers of Benro have floating around on various forums and newsgroups for a few months now, and since I happened to be in China this summer for a couple months I decided to see what all the fuss is about.

First thing, ebay is a rip off on these things. don't know who is selling them or how, but they're only half the price he's asking.

as for the tripods themselves, they are identical to the gitzo's they claim to clone with exception given to that the legs must be extended from top to bottom (isn't this how it's always done anyway?) and the base below the head mount is an angular, kind of curved triangle as opposed to the round seen on the gitzo.

as far as i can tell without running any sort of endurance tests, these really are just as good as gitzos. how can that happen, at a 1/4 the price, and in china no less?

here's the story i'm hearing about benro. gitzo was looking to outsource it's legs to china a couple years ago. they picked up on this company, yilee precision in guangzhou (by hong kong), and signed them to a deal. gitzo taught them everything, practically gave the factory blueprints. what gitzo didn't know, yilee set up a dummy corp called benro and was building an exact copy of the gitzo factory simultaneously, practically on the other side of the hill (common story for businesses that aren't careful outsourcing in china). gitzo started noticing exact copies of their gear on the shelves of beijing and shanghai, with "benro" in place of "gitzo" and got just a wee bit upset. gitzo couldn't do anything, cause it's china, and they care fark all for intellectual property, especially considering gitzo is a foreign co and benro is local. after gitzo got out, benro established itself as a legit co in china, and has got the rep as de facto proware for tripods amongst chinese photographers.

of course, you can't find benro abroad (except ebay or grey market) cause most places abroad, especially the developed world, would shut benro down before they even leased a warehouse on patent infringement intel theft, etc

that said, i wouldn't say that the benros are equivalent to the real gitzos. just cause you have the manual and tools doesn't make up for years of experience in precision. i can't say if these tripods will perform as well as their gitzo counterparts 1, 5, or 10 years from now. but in the store they seem the real deal as far as i can tell.

real enough for me to buy one. at 1/4 the price of a gitzo, if it only last me 2 years i'll have gotten my money's worth.

of course, this also brings up qualms some may have about china's policies on pirates.... but i'm a student i consider myself exempt for any such moral dilemmas :-D