10 Stop ND Filters Compared - $10 to $360

howdy folks if you've been following the channel for a while you know I don't tend to use a whole lot of filters they can only be grade your image but for certain applications they can be fantastic so I got in a whole bunch of 10 stop neutral density filters to compare them and see is there really justification for the huge variation in price now all the ones we're focusing on 77 Mill screw ons almost all of them come in different sizes of course for different lenses but I went for screw ons rather than slide in ones because it's a lot more accessible for people and you don't need to buy the whole filter kit and there's a whole lot on the market so first of all 10 stop why would you use it now this is not just for knocking down your exposure a little bit so you have more control over your aperture for example that's where a three-stop will come in handy 10 stop takes out more than 999 out of a thousand of the light it's really knocking down your exposure 10 stops means once up is half the light two stops is 1/4 if we follow that all the way through 1/8 1/16 1/32 a 64th or 128 or 256 or 512 a 1,024 of the amount of light actually passes through so what is that good for essentially it's to allow you to get long exposures in daytime so for example if you were shooting wide open at F 2.8 a 10 stop will only give your camera the light equivalent of quickly counted on your hands pause me and figure it out [Music] so why is that hopeful it means that you can get an extremely long shutter speed even in the glaring Sun or if for example you want to shoot at a shallow depth of field so that you've got the building sharp and the water out of focus so anyway I've got me in a bunch of different foods ranging from ten dollars through to 380 builders all doing essentially the same thing but vastly varying in quality and price so how I'm going to test these I'm heading down to Dumbo in New York to set up a simple shot looking over the the piers the old pier Forks in the water shooting back at the financial district now to make sure that I get this all right I'm going to be shooting custom white balances all the time regularly as the light changes and updating the camera and then I'm actually going to be presenting you the JPEG straight out of camera this isn't about getting an amazing final image this is just about seeing which fielders have a color cast or a bad vignette or a big loss in sharpness and contrast and of course using so many different filters I am taking along some filter wrenches to be able to get them off if some gets stuck as I go through the specs a little bit later one of the reasons that brass is preferred over aluminium or other products they're less likely to get jammed brass being soft there's it's easy a few to work and on and off if it does get misaligned so with all of that let's head on over so the area I was shooting is at Dumbo Dumbo if you didn't know is an acronym for down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass and if you just walk from the ferry pier about two minutes you get to this location really easy to set up and get access to now it was great chatting with a few other photographers there I just chose an easy vantage point rather than the most creative because I had a bag full of filters that I needed to whip on and off in a one-hour period to try and get it as close to the same lighting situation as I went through all of the different shots now I went with a Hasselblad x1d in this case for three main reasons first off in this situation the image quality is just unbeatable second it's got an unlimited timer it does something like an hour rather than the thirty seconds of a lot of other cameras if it needs 109 seconds that's what it'll take so that's really handy and thirdly it has a really cool color picker so when I'm using my white balance card I can take a sample shot of that in the light that's hitting the same buildings in the background and then in camera actually select the gray cut and it takes a custom white balance off that so really accurate and handy to then know all of the JPEGs in my series at the right white balance to accurately compare filter to filter really beautiful day shooting on to Dumbo now let's head back in the studio and take a look at the different images and see which is which and can you tell the difference between a ten-dollar filter and a 380 dollar filter in terms of results okay so that was a really fun way to start 2019 now as I said I went through and specifically kept taking white balance checks to make sure that I was keeping it close because there were some surprising results the most surprising thing was how goddamn filthy my sensor is I so spare me the criticisms I've realized that and I'm booked in for a sense of clean already so I'm gonna run through and talk you through in the order that I actually tested them so that you can see them as they came out of camera as I said this is all with the custom white balance jpg out of camera so you're seeing the actual results based on the filters okay now so first of all I took the white balance setting got a shot with no filter on and here's our results then first up the polar Pro quartz line now these guys are brass they're multi coated they they say it's a precision coating and that it's fused quartz glass and the glass is just one millimeter thick so that this is just about the thinnest of the bunch now for me this has minimal color shift great sharpness and contrast it is however the second most expensive at two hundred and forty dollars so you would want it to be performing great now I'm actually not going to tell you the price of every one as we go through for two reasons one it can influence how you see the shots and two a lot of them go on sale and some of these are already on like 50% off and that's going to change over time so I'll pop links below and you can click through to check the ones that you actually like the results yeah if there are extreme high or low price then I'll mention it next up I tested the B&W mr c-110 m now this is you'll find these on a lot of them I quote that they're saying that they're using shot brand glass which is a good brand of glass some of them mention the type of glass some don't because of course they make lots of different kinds so this is just using some kind of shot glass it's got a simple multi reflective coating on it for me the vignette and the color of this one are okay but not fantastic there is an obvious vignette coming through here now that is the lower price the B&W range so then I took another sample to get the white balance the light changes in color throughout that afternoon I was shooting this at about 3 p.m. but the Sun sets here at 4:30 so every 5 minutes the color temperature is actually changing if you want to learn more about how to use light red light C light including color direction shadow all of that check out my take control of the light course over at the website next up is the format high-tech fire crest this is the lower of the two models that I tested out this says that it's using shot super white glass which is about the top you can get it says as hydrophobic scratch resistant has 15 layer mori reflective coating on close inspection though I am seeing an obvious loss of sharpness on this guy so that's a little bit disappointing next up the F top lab now this one says it has a 16 layer multi coating it's short crown glass don't know what that type of glass is aluminium frame that is hydrophobic now this has an obvious cool color cast and an obvious loss of sharpness but this guy came in at $10 by far the cheapest of the bunch and I think it and two or three others are actually the same filter but rebranded and varying in price quite a bit as well so that was one where actually needed to use the filter remover because it went on off straight not perfectly straight and that's something that you get with higher quality ones just overall the build is more precise but for 10 bucks if you just want to play around it's not a terrible option next up the breakthrough Photography X - this is the lower of their range the X - it's a this using HK 9l glass I don't know exactly what that is and an aluminium frame with no sides but it's not the same build or glass as their higher X 4 they say that is weather sealed so safe for outdoor use that it will fully seal the front of your lens that it's only three and a half mil thick and they say that this doesn't have a color shift at all and is the best for sharpness their whole range they claim that now for me this had a definite green shift and I did recheck it I verified it and then jumping up to their flagship 2x4 using the same settings immediately after this is a result we're getting so an obviously different result now this is using the shot be 270 glass which is the same as super white glass this is brass it's got a great grip on the side also weather sealed eight layers of anti-reflective coating now this is obviously a lot better color than the x2 had but both of them had good sharpness now the x4 actually was a really good performer in my mind so I actually used that as kind of a benchmark later in the test when I needed to compare and make sure I had my settings right because the color was coming really well off that next up was the highest solace IR Andina this is said to cut the infrared now a couple of them do that and some of them do that and don't even mention it because on those longer exposures the build-up of infrared can cause a color shift so they're often dealing with that in their own way but this one specifically mentions that it's got special things in there to try and cut the infrared this says that it's non coded surprisingly all the others are touting how great the coatings are now the color on this is good not excellent but good some vignette endure slight loss of sharpness but again for where this is in the price range of all of them that's actually a pretty good result next up is the format high-tech fire crest ultra now this is as expensive as the top-end B&W another ones that we're looking at here this has got 15 layer coating it says it's super slim but it's five and a half mil and that's about as thick as any that we tested in this this is using the short super white glass which is the same as we saw on the x4 this however has an obvious yellow cast so it's clearly not just the shot glass that's giving us the performance it's the overall coatings next up was the ice branded one now this was significantly more expensive than the f/stop labs but I think it's actually exactly the same and I guess ice means blue cuz it's got an obvious color shift and loss of sharpness next up was the Helio Payne 10 stop now this is using shot glass got grip sides for some reason it was giving us a longer exposure this was around 23 seconds whereas the shots before and after only 17 so it may actually be stopping ten and a half stops or something I don't know 10 and a bit stops anyway but for me it's noticeably D saturated so I actually took hers safety shot with the x4 and you can see it went back to normal so I think for some reason it does actually desaturate a little bit next up now here's for something completely different the tiffin xle series accent now like you'll probably are I was very surprised at that results so I actually rewind to make sure I hadn't made a mistake and got the same result then I took a safety with the same settings using the x4 again and this was the result then took another one with the Tiffin and this was the result so it's clearly that that's what the filter is giving us now there's no mention on the sales websites that I've seen but on Tiffin's own website they do mention that this is specifically to cut infrared and that it can cause a color shift so there you go and they say it's more suited to black and white shooting so here back of my conversion yes it comes up beautifully but then so do all of the other ones so unless you're shooting with an infrared modified camera I mean I don't know that I can recommend that to anyone next up is the BW SC 110 this is the cheapest of their range it's still brassed it's still shot glass it's still got coatings but they're simpler than the middle and high-end ones but it does have obvious veneering and color sheet deterioration compared to the higher end ones like this which is the top-end one about triple the price of the low-end one it's got mold decoding it still browse all of that stuff it adds extra coatings for water repelling it mentions that it's a bit wider than others so you may not be able to get you hood on there things like the breakthrough specifically made very narrow so your hood will still fit on but this XS Pro is fantastic the color and sharpness are as good as any that we tested here next up is the sing ray thin more slow now this is 4.6 millimeter thick not thin its aluminium not brass it's non coded they don't mention the glass type and this is far and away the most expensive like 50 percent more than the next most expensive one I do think it's as good as the excess pro from BW and breakthrough clothes anyway probably 90% as good as those but a double the price is just a bad proposition and it's in this Natha little wallet that still got their phone number and stuff on it I feel like this is excess stock that was meant to be sold in the 80s and just got left in the warehouse because that price is kind of ridiculous next up is the newer slim 77 3.6 mill they just say it's optical glass good to know it's transparent it gives a very blue color cast it's not sharp and I think it's pretty much the same as the other super cheap ones we've looked at here and that's pretty much rounding out our groups okay so final wrap-up now sorry to say but as in most areas of life to an extent you get what you pay for there's some obvious overpriced ones were skipping that you're not getting anything for that extra money but a couple of things came out so a lot of the brands have two or three levels and in every case their top level was superior in terms of build quality but most importantly image quality now the ones that are all around the same price point the BW XS Pro the x4 from breakthrough the more expensive polar Pro they are all performing the best they are fantastic that said when you get to their lower end ones at least of savored BW it's significantly less impressive optically and a lot closer to the ten and twenty dollar no-name ones but you are still getting brass and the overall better coatings just I don't think you can justify the price increase on their lower end ones overall the Hoya soleus is giving great bang for buck in terms of where it is in the market and the total price you're paying for it out of all of them no I would have to go with either the BW XS pro that's great option but I think at the same price even better image quality thinner and just feels like a beautiful build quality would be the x4 from breakthrough photography but links below you can check out each of the different filters that I've shown here if there was one that particularly appealed to you likewise with filter remover they are really handy especially if you're using a bunch of them so please do let me know if you have any questions make sure you like subscribe turn on notifications all that good stuff because I have a bunch of new content coming through 2019 that I can't wait to share with you guys so thank you I'll see you soon

Channel: Matt Granger

Views: 325,731

Rating: 4.8523397 out of 5

Keywords: long exposure, 10 stop, 15 stop, big stopper, neutral density, ND, filter, nd filter, best, compared, lee, cokin, BW, B+W, breakthrough photography, hoya, tiffen, screw, slide in, landscape, grad

Id: qlaSjUwhAtQ

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 02 2019