"The longer the focal length is, the more apparent vibration becomes, and the demand for eliminating or preventing that vibration is increased."
"Even though a 300mm/f4 lens might only weigh as much as a 70-200mm/f2.8, you still deal with the same magnification factor in terms of "revealing" the vibration within a system. This may be emphasized by lower mass of the lens, since a lighter setup has less inertial resistance to outside vibration."
Yes, but the question is "
Which outside vibration?".
Most large amplitude vibrations in the everyday world are low frequency. If you look at the graph purporting to show that an RRS tripod is much better because it has better vibration damping (
http://www.reallyrightstuff.com/tripod-guide) you will see that where the RRS is better is around 100-500Hz, and it is no better below 100Hz (note that the scale is dB, so the same green area lower down the X-axis represents a much smaller effect, so you can ignore the area up at 5-10kHz). The large amplitude vibrations a photographer is likely to encounter, like trucks and trains and herds of wildebeest, are low frequency, in that < 100 Hz range where the RRS is no better. The 100-500Hz range is ordinary music and human speech - middle C on the piano is 260Hz - so
if you regularly photograph next to someone with a
really loud stereo you might want the RRS, but most of us do not often encounter large amplitude vibrations in that range.
Another point the tripod makers ignore is that vibrations arising in the camera are a different problem to vibrations coming through the ground. The camera generates vibrations when the mirror goes up and when the shutter opens. The camera damps the vibrations arising in the mirror quite effectively, and in some cameras Nikon adds a tiny delay between mirror movement and shutter opening to allow the vibrations to decay, so mirror movement is not a big issue. Vibrations caused by shutter opening cannot be damped by the tripod until they reach the tripod, so the tripod cannot have any effect on the first part of the exposure, and the faster the shutter speed the more of the exposure that is. The speed of sound in aluminium rods is 5000 m/sec, so if you have a 2m tripod it takes the vibrations 0.4msec to get to the bottom, which is not trivial when shutter speed is 1/1000 and the whole exposure lasts 1msec. The damping figures you get in that RRS graph are at equilibrium. That is OK for external vibrations, but not for internal vibrations, where you need to know not how good the damping is at equilibrium but how good it is very quickly.
The tripod can affect vibrations arising in the camera only to the degree that the tripod and the camera are coupled - act as a single mass. If you have a rubber or cork pad between the camera and the tripod, or a poorly fitting quick release, the tripod has much less effect on vibrations arising in the camera.
It is very easy to test whether your tripod is damping internal camera vibrations. Closing the doors on a good car makes a different sound to the doors on a poorly made car: lower pitched, shorter, and with fewer overtones. The reason is that on a good car the parts are tightly assembled. So if you listen to the sound of your camera shutter when it is just sat on a flat hard surface, then clamped on the tripod with the ballhead tightened, you should hear the same difference as with the car doors, and if you hear no difference you have a problem.
