Gobe 10 Stop ND Filter Review: Best Budget ND Filter?

hurry welcome to George Klein photography neutral density filters if you've ever done long exposure photography you will know that they're one of those but suck it you just kind of have to have if you want to take advantage of what they can do for you there are some software tricks that can emulate the results but they're they're just not very good and they take a huge amount computing power to do well and particularly if we're doing with RAW files so ND filters i'm trouble with them is they're quite expensive the good ones at least can cost hundreds of dollars from brands like lee polar Pro or breakthrough and that's a lot of money for what is essentially sunglasses for your camera for those who you don't know a neutral density filter is just a darkened piece of glass that you put in front of lens and it limits how much light it's measuring stops this is a ten stop one which means it cuts out ten stops of light or 99.9% of the light entering the lens which is an awful lot and you can get some really cool effects with this for a long exposures taking you know half second to several minutes and then sort of thing um but they're expensive so when I was looking for one a few months ago before trip to New Zealand where there is all the water and stuff you can take advantage off with a neutral density filter I stumbled across a brand called Gobi they are a fairly new one they've been around to think about 2014 and they make nd filters quite a large range of them as it happens they're also quite an interesting company in terms of their environmental consciousness if you register the filter when you get it they will plant I think five trees to sort of give a bit that's the environment so that's nice and they are cheap this filter which is a 72 mil filter thread only costs $40 us or about $60 Australian I think on their website and for that it's surprisingly good the build quality is quite nice it's made of aluminium the filter thread fits on and off quite well it's nice and smooth I haven't had any issues with that and it comes in quite a nice protective padded metal case a tin that you can keep it in um so looking good and I have used this filter for a few months I've done some field testing of it in New Zealand so from real-world experience I can say the image quality is good in terms of image quality there are really two things you look for with nd filters and this is where your money is usually going and that is sharpness and color cast and color casts pretty obvious you're putting a darkened colored bit of glass in front of your sensor there's a good chance it's going to introduce your color cast and this is not just with cheap filters li filters which which were a lot of you've heard of are known to have a slight blue color cost cost it's easily correctable in post it's not really a problem but it is there and generally speaking the cheaper you go on nd filters the worse the color cast is going to get and the really expensive ones are actually color neutral the other line sharpness again you put a piece of glass in front of the lens if it's not as good quality as the lens it can negatively impact sharpness now these girls are supposed to be made of Japanese glass there's no brand name associated with that Japanese glass it's not shot glass for example but you know it's claimed to be quite good quality glass and from field experience I can attest that it doesn't seem too intrusive carcast I didn't notice any sharpness issues in New Zealand but for this test for this review I want to be more scientific about so I did some more in-depth and controlled testing which we'll have a look at now okay so here we have two images shot one after the other and midday Sun so nice consistent lighting the settings for this were f8 ISO 200 which is the base ISO for the F Fuji X t2 the white balance is locked at 5500 Kelvin and the focus is manually set the only barrier between these is the addition of the ND filter for one and the corresponding trench which has to be to bring the exposure back up the show speeds used were 1 mm and 1/2 second which are 10 stops apart I'm just using a rode videomic box because it's a convenient sample of type on a white background which is a simple but quite demanding test for this sort of thing you can see that one image is slightly brighter than the other and that becomes more obvious when we crop into 100% and put them side-by-side apart from the very slight exposure of difference everything is looking very favorable the sharpness of both images is pretty much identical to my eye I can't see any obvious color cast this is really good if you want to pause the video and make guess which is which maybe put it in the comments okay place your bets and the picture on the right that's slightly brighter actually has the ND filter if it makes you feel any better I checked multiple times which was which while making this video I also tried one more test I took the shot with the filter into Adobe Camera Raw dress to see how my tried to bring the exposure down to make it match long without the filter and I swear hand on heart there are two images on screen right now dropping the exposure by just naught point two two of a stop and the images are basically identical less than a third of a stop is essentially irrelevant in real world terms you would never notice that if you were looking at the east side by side additionally the fact that changing exposures all that was needed to make these images effectively identical means that any color cast is basically imperceptible and therefore irrelevant okay wow that's pretty impressive really as I said I've used this in the field I knew it was good but I didn't rather that it was that good I was expecting to make a load of apologies about this filter and say that it was good for the price but after doing those tests it's just good like there's really no sharpness loss and there's no color cast which is very very impressive particularly at this price point but it's just impressive . for our filter now there is one image quality thing you need to be aware of which is vignettes if you're using this on wide-angle lens you are gonna see quite a serious vignette at the edge of the on my Fuji 10 to 24 lens at the wide end there is a big big vignette however that is kind of unavoidable with these sorts of filters and I'm just I think this is best to explain why with a little animation here we have a side-on cutaway view of a filter on our lens there is like coming in perpendicular to the filter and like coming in at an angle if we draw a line along the path that the light takes through the glass where we see that the light coming at an angle is how to pass through substantially more glass so as you can see unless you make a filter specially designed for wide-angle lenses you're kind of just gonna have a vignette at the white end it is removable in post as Extreme as that vignette is Lightroom or Camera Raw you can remove that and bring back all that detail some of the Explorer expensive ones I think have slightly less vignette but you're kind of just gonna have a vignette white angles with these things so that's not really a negative of this it's just a fact of physics really so where does that leave us well this is a really really good buy particularly for the price but just in general this is a good ND filter and even if you have a really good ND filter I'd honestly recommend this as a backup so just keeping your back in case it gets broken or lost or something because it's that good and I'm not sure why Kobe aren't charging more for this they definitely could because it is up there with a lot of better brands I am able to compare this directly to them Sam owned other brands if you want to see a sort of broad test of a lot of nd filters Matt Granger did a really good one where I think compare ten neutral density filters I'll link it below he didn't compare the go V in that but looking at his results and looking at my own tests and my own experience I'd honestly say this is up there with some of the more expensive ones in his tests and in general so really take a serious look at Gobi for any purpose now there are a couple of caveats to that which are first of all sample variation is a thing I might just have a particularly good go filter and others might be less good that's a risky run with any brand but obviously cheap ones quality control is one of the first things that goes with a cheaper product however I have no evidence that that is the case and if they're all this good all the more product to go because it's fantastic the other thing to bear in mind is I am testing this on a 24 megapixel Fuji XT 2 camera if you put this on a higher res camera you may see more issues you know if you've got a Nikon d a 50 or Sony a7r Mark 4 with 40 or 60 megapixels obviously that is going to be more demanding of your optics to get the best out there but I would say why are you putting a $40 filter on a $4,000 camera in that case so again that isn't really something you can expect from filters not why I'm not saying it can't do it maybe it can but from my testing it's a 24 megapixel so bear that in mind but overall I am so so impressed with this thing for the price and just in general is a fantastic filter and honestly just going by one kurz long exposure photography is one of the things that can really elevate your photography to a whole other level in terms of look and you can achieve things that you just can't do any other way and you need an ND filter flat and this one is fantastic well he would note is go be to actually make different levels of ND filter which are measured in Peaks as in mountain peaks they've got one two and three peak filters with corresponding increases in quality the three peak ones seem to only be their high-end variable NDS but this is a two peak neutral density filter so it is the slightly better one whether that actually relates to a significant increase in image quality I don't know but I've tested the two peak one so that is what this review relates to but yeah check this company out because they are fantastic and if this is a good representation of the car quality you can expect from them then they are going farward this because they are really really good Hayley LIKE and subscribe for more videos thanks for watching

Channel: George Keleny Photography

Views: 8,379

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Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 14 2020