It's hard finding the right compromise. What I want is a single head which will be good for landscape and macro, but can handle the long lens on occasions. I intend to keep the 393 for wildlife sessions with the long lens, but dont really want to carry two heads on trips away when I'm likely to be doing a variety of subjects, or on long days out in the hills, when again, I might well be using the full range from 17mm to 500mm lenses.
After posting yesterday, I went back to the manfrotto website, and in the light of all your advice looked harder at the 3-way heads. There are some that look like they would handle the long lens in terms of weight. The 229 would easily cope, but is quite heavy, so the 329RC4 looks it might be worth a look. The combined weight of my heaviest combo - 1DsII, sigma 500 and 2*TC is a little under 5kg, and the 329 is rated at 9kg capacity.
I think I might have found the general purpose head I was looking for. Thanks for all your advice everyone. All I need to do now is find one I can test!
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