Best filters for landscape photography

[Vieri]

Hello everyone, as many of you know I have been an Ambassador for Formatt-Hitech for 5 years. I left FH last March, for reasons that I'll obviously not share, and I have been looking for new filters to replace my FH kit since.

To do so, as I always do when I have to select my gear, I took the most thorough and "scientific" approach I could - so, I set off to do the most comprehensive filter review I could, and select my filters according to the results.

I contacted the biggest eight brands on the market producing glass filters, and I ended up with six brands to test. Here are my results, which I hope you'll find interesting:

Link edited. Please post the text of the article rather than linking to an external site.

Enjoy the read, and if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Best regards,

Vieri

 

[Strodav]

Of course I looked for the brand of glass filters I use and have been very happy with, and it was not included in your test. Why reject Lee?

 

[Vieri]

Of course I looked for the brand of glass filters I use and have been very happy with, and it was not included in your test. Why reject Lee?

As written in the article, I decided to test brands offering every filter in glass in their lineup. Lee doesn't have Grad ND square filters in glass, only resin. It'll be my pleasure to add them if and when they will, if they'll be interested. Hope this helps,

Vieri

 

[Strodav]

As written in the article, I decided to test brands offering every filter in glass in their lineup. Lee doesn't have Grad ND square filters in glass, only resin. It'll be my pleasure to add them if and when they will, if they'll be interested. Hope this helps,

Vieri

You are right and thanks for the enlightment, it is much appreciated. I went to Lee's website and here's what they say: "Our resin Neutral Density Graduated Filters are all made by hand in our UK-based factory, and our resin is an optically correct polycarbonate of the highest quality, which we also manufacture ourselves. The reason we use this substrate is because of its ability to ‘take’ the dye evenly and controllably. Also, thanks to the carefully selected organic compounds that give the resin its high optical quality, the filters have a very low reflectance that mean no additional anti-reflection coatings are required."

As I posted earlier, I am very happy with Lee filters and have not had any problems at all with color shift or any other artifacts, so I'm wondering why you think glass GNDs are superior to high quality resin GNDs?

 

[Vieri]

You are right and thanks for the enlightment, it is much appreciated. I went to Lee's website and here's what they say: "Our resin Neutral Density Graduated Filters are all made by hand in our UK-based factory, and our resin is an optically correct polycarbonate of the highest quality, which we also manufacture ourselves. The reason we use this substrate is because of its ability to ‘take’ the dye evenly and controllably. Also, thanks to the carefully selected organic compounds that give the resin its high optical quality, the filters have a very low reflectance that mean no additional anti-reflection coatings are required."

As I posted earlier, I am very happy with Lee filters and have not had any problems at all with color shift or any other artifacts, so I'm wondering why you think glass GNDs are superior to high quality resin GNDs?

You are welcome. The answer is, years of experience with resin filters before moving to glass ones. Might be personal, of course, and YMMV. Having to delimitate the field of what to test, I decided to include only glass filters. It would certainly be very interesting to have the same kind of review done with resin filters, or mixing and matching, but that will be someone else's task, I am afraid.

Best regards,

Vieri

 

[ntz]

Servus Vieri,

you could additionally examine the support attitude of the brands .. after your review I don't understand completely to Breakthrough notorious arrogant attitude ...

Personally I am using now only magnetic circular filters (Kase specifically) .. In past I had a NiSi kit but I did hate in reality to use the filters in the field with that holder and square glasses .... brrrr, that's a nightmare to remind that .. circular magnetic filters are also stackable and I don't need a GND, for me stackable ND and CPL that I can attach in matter of seconds (because I have on my lenses a magnetic adapter ring and I use a magnetic front caps) is absolutely pleasant compared to using those molestatory and ugly kits with square glasses ..

thanks for article, I like it ..

cheers, ~d

 

[TreeofLifeStairs]

I just bought the Colby brown ultra kit last week. Honestly, I didn’t even look at any other brand because of seeing your work.

I’m interested in reading your reviews of the other brands if you can copy and paste the text since the moderators won’t allow you to link to it.

 

[Vieri]

Servus Vieri,

you could additionally examine the support attitude of the brands .. after your review I don't understand completely to Breakthrough notorious arrogant attitude ...

Personally I am using now only magnetic circular filters (Kase specifically) .. In past I had a NiSi kit but I did hate in reality to use the filters in the field with that holder and square glasses .... brrrr, that's a nightmare to remind that .. circular magnetic filters are also stackable and I don't need a GND, for me stackable ND and CPL that I can attach in matter of seconds (because I have on my lenses a magnetic adapter ring and I use a magnetic front caps) is absolutely pleasant compared to using those molestatory and ugly kits with square glasses ..

thanks for article, I like it ..

cheers, ~d

Hey there! Attitude is such a personal thing, and might vary over time according to who you are talking to, so I don't think it would be fair to add such a section in the review - i.e., my dealings with Breakthrough UK (the European counterpart) have been extremely pleasant, prompt response and helpful.

Happy you enjoyed the article!

I just bought the Colby brown ultra kit last week. Honestly, I didn’t even look at any other brand because of seeing your work.

I’m interested in reading your reviews of the other brands if you can copy and paste the text since the moderators won’t allow you to link to it.

Hey there! Thanks for your interest, so sad to see mods removing the link. Obviously, I have no intention to past the full article here, for one it's way too long to do so. If you are interested, just click on the linktree in my signature, and you'll find a link to the blog, where the article is. Enjoy!

Best regards,

Vieri

 

[smoke665]

Hello everyone, as many of you know I have been an Ambassador for Formatt-Hitech for 5 years. I left FH last March, for reasons that I'll obviously not share, and I have been looking for new filters to replace my FH kit since.

To do so, as I always do when I have to select my gear, I took the most thorough and "scientific" approach I could - so, I set off to do the most comprehensive filter review I could, and select my filters according to the results.

I contacted the biggest eight brands on the market producing glass filters, and I ended up with six brands to test. Here are my results, which I hope you'll find interesting:

Link edited. Please post the text of the article rather than linking to an external site.

Enjoy the read, and if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Best regards,

Vieri

Always enjoy your work, I'm sure your write up would be equally good. Unfortunately your link apparently didn't pass muster with the guardians of the site. I hope you would consider posting the text of review rather than a link so the rest of us can read it.

 

[TreeofLifeStairs]

I just got finished reading your review. I’m definitely interested in reading your next review of the filter holders.

I will say that even though the formatt hicrest returned a more magenta image (rather than neutral); in your real world test for sharpness, I found the color pleasing. I’m not familiar with your camera’s sensor but if it uses a bayer filter array then it has more green pixels, so I wonder if the magenta balances that out at all. Just a thought.

 

[Vieri]

Always enjoy your work, I'm sure your write up would be equally good. Unfortunately your link apparently didn't pass muster with the guardians of the site. I hope you would consider posting the text of review rather than a link so the rest of us can read it.

Thank you for the kind words. I am not going to post the full article here, for reasons of length. Not allowing links to informational articles on a blog is bizarre, and while I respect the forum decision I'll have to ask you to follow the link to my blog that you'll find in the signature, the article is there for everyone to see.

I just got finished reading your review. I’m definitely interested in reading your next review of the filter holders.

I will say that even though the formatt hicrest returned a more magenta image (rather than neutral); in your real world test for sharpness, I found the color pleasing. I’m not familiar with your camera’s sensor but if it uses a bayer filter array then it has more green pixels, so I wonder if the magenta balances that out at all. Just a thought.

Thank you, glad you found it interesting! Colour cast is not a problem when uniformly spread on the image, such as the cc resulting from a ND or Polariser. When it comes from a Grad ND, on the other hand, it's a serious pain to fix.

Best regards,

Vieri

 

[TreeofLifeStairs]

Vieri, do you think your results will be consistent from one filter to the next? Say you were to test ten 3 stop ND filters from the same brand; would you expect your results to be identical or do you think there would be differences from one filter to the next; and if so, how much would be your guess?

 

[Vieri]

Vieri, do you think your results will be consistent from one filter to the next? Say you were to test ten 3 stop ND filters from the same brand; would you expect your results to be identical or do you think there would be differences from one filter to the next; and if so, how much would be your guess?

Hey there, that's an interesting question, and one I have no answers for. In my experience with only one brand, which I used for the last 5 years, when I broke a filter and got a new one to replace it, things looked pretty much the same, but I didn't test them in a controlled environment - I just trusted that the manufacturer would be consistent. Hope this helps!

Best regards,

Vieri