Manfrotto 3 Way Pan/Tilt Photo Tripod
A pan head, also called pan and tilt head, allows independent rotation of the camera about two or three perpendicular axes, which normally do not intersect. Typical pan heads have lockable levers for each axis, a scale marked in degrees at least for the vertical axis, and one or more spirit levels. This construction is significantly more complicated than that of a ball head.
Pan heads can be used for panoramas, but suffer from the deficiency that the axes of rotation normally do not go through the entrance pupil of the lens and thus can give rise to problems with parallax. A better choice for panoramas is a custom-built panoramic tripod head.
Some specialist pan heads, such as the Induro PHQ series, offer up to five axes of rotation, two of them in parallel with the other axes.
