2026-04-27 An Unidentified Quick-Release Plate

When you own many tripods, and expect to buy more, you start to collect quick release plates any chance you get. That is mostly because a lot of tripods come up for sale missing their QR plates. Although there are sites that claim to have most sizes, and many sites that will sell you an original QR plate, many charge a lot.
I have tried making QR plates out of wood. It isn’t easy to make the plates because they are small and sometimes several sides need to be at exact bevels. One of my initially successful plates failed miserably when the tripod screw pulled through the small thickness of wood left after I had bored a hole to take the screw head.
But enough of my historical adventures…

This plate came up for sale in a junk bin of $1 items. Keep in mind some of those items included lenses, flashes, battery grips and the like, so paying a whole dollar for a plate for something I may or may not have is me taking a chance.
In this bottom view you can see the platform is 2¾ by 2 inches. The QR section surrounding the tripod screw is 1⅜ inches square. It tapers in to being 1⅛ inches square by the time it touches the platform.

The QR section is about 5/16 of an inch deep. The whole plate—including the QR tapered block—is slightly under ¾ of an inch thick.

Somehow in the design or execution the tripod screw is not in the exact center of the counter-bored depression. It doesn’t make any operational difference, I just noticed it as a slip-up on someone’s part.

There are some cameras—particularly video and/or movie cameras—that have a second orientation stud on their bases in front of the tripod screw. This QR plate has a plastic sort-of spring loaded hole for that stud. If your camera has just a flat base the QR plates stud will press down out of the way. If a stud shows up the plastic bit will just get out of the way. The blue ribbed plastic surface will grip the camera baseplate to prevent the camera swiveling once mounted on the tripod.
And of course having a bubble level built into the QR plate is a plus point in its features! It should end up behind the camera where you can see it (as opposed to under the lens where you wouldn’t).

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