Filters cheap or expensive?

I was interested to read on the comments section of an article titled 5 Kinds of Photography Equipment That Waste Your Money

link

One of which was cheap UV filters. Comments were to the effect that with them your pictures are not so sharp. I have always used fairly budget filters and i need to replace them and its made me think.

Question is what do you use, are they pretty much the same as expensive filters and are you just paying for the name? Do they adversely affect the image?

I only use them to protect the lens(although im having a lot of fun with CPL at the moment), but if they are affecting my image quality maybe i won't use them at all.

Ah the age old question of filters, love em or hate em

I always used to have a UV filter on my lenses then I read a thread on this very forum and now have none at all, other than a couple of cheap CPLs for occasional use.

Your going to get lots of advice on this one but at the end of the day only you can decide which way to go.

Any filter is going to affect the quality of an image to some degree, how visible this is will depend on the filter and circumstances.

There is the argument why buy expensive lenses and then put a cheap filter in front of it, but ther is also the argument that a filter will protect the front element from knocks, this in itself has been debated as to how much protection a filter really offers.

My advice:
Ditch the filters and take more care with your lenses, always use the lens hood which will help to protect from knocks. if your going to sling the camera over you shoulder after every shot then get into the habit of replacing the lens cap.

Filters can have their uses in extreme conditions but for day to day photography you dont need them.

My view is:

UV filters - not really necessary

Polarisers - essential for landscape photography (I use Hoya Pro 1 D)

ND - useful, I have a B+W 10 stop for long exposures & a 4 stop for waterfalls etc

ND Grad - useful to balance sky/land, I use the Hi-tech "P" system although I'm not convinced they are great quality and will probably change them.


As a general rule I'd say avoid cheap filters, Hoya Pro filters are not too expensive but very good

Simon

Exactly !! +1 ^^^

same as most things, you get what you pay for.

Absolutely. Compare the prices of lee filters and Hitech ones....

Bret

There is a difference between 'budget' and 'cheap'.

You can buy a perfectly good Hoya 77mm UV filter for about £35 and on a normal camera and normal lens it will do a perfectly good job. A B+W will probably cost more like £80 and is probably worth it if your lens is worth £2,000 but not if your lens is worth £200!

But buy something like this and you're actually doing worse than throwing your money away!

If you want to see if a filter is any good, hold it in front of a high power pair of binoculars. If it changes the focus, looks softer or distorts (even slightly) then bit it.

I notice that they specify cheap UVs. Without getting into the UV/no UV debate, I would hope we can all agree that putting a ten quid piece of glass in front of a one grand lens is a bit daft. They might as well have said cheap filters.

Nice to see rocket blowers - work of the devil - get a panning.

To turn this on it's head, would you buy a fantastic and expensive amplifier and play it through the cheapest speakers you could find?

Rocker Blowers didn't get a panning at all! He gave the blower brush a panning because it shed bristles everywhere and didn't produce enough force to remove any dust. He went on to say he does use a Rocket Blower.

Personally I have both a Blower Brush and a Rocker Blower. I find the blower brush has plenty of force for removing small amounts of dust from the front elements of lenses as long as you remove the brush first (which is why it's detachable). The brush itself has never shed a single bristle - I can only assume the writer of the article either has a particularly cheap and poor quality example or doesn't know how to use it effectively.

Personally I find the brush more useful for cleaning dirt out of the grooves on the rubber grip parts of lens zoom and focusing rings, than for cleaning actual optical elements. Particularly on my Tamron lens, on which the grooves are quite narrow so you really need a brush to get in there.

The Rocket Blower has a lot more force, therefore is more effective, but it's a bit large to carry around in my camera bag all the time hence the reason I find the smaller blower bulb useful.

I'd be interested to know why you think the Rocket Blower is the work of the devil? In my opinion the only real problem with it is not the device itself but the fact that it doesn't come with any instructions. When using it to blow dust off your sensor it's easy to blow dust onto your focusing screen - or worse, behind it - if you use it incorrectly. If you use the proper technique there's very little chance of that happening. Hence it should really come with some form of instructions - other than that I don't really see a problem with it.

FYI I have £60 and £100 lenses so a £10 filter may be about right!

The problem with blowers or blower brushes is that you have no control over the destination of the dust that they do shift. With lenses this may not be such a problem, but to use one on a sensor (or any other part of the internals of a body) is just asking for trouble.

fools gold I tell ya...
you think it is protecting the lens, until you ding it and the thing jams onto your lens and you break the lens trying to pry it off... or it takes a hit the lens might have survived and shatters and scratches the lens... especially true when you think of it this way.. the glass in the front element of your lens is like ten or twenty times thicker than your cheap filter....

Best defence? Don't be clumsy.
Second best defence? Rigid lens hood.

You'd roll down your car window, rather than shoot through it, right? so why put an even cheaper, more inferior piece of glass right on lens?
as for rocket blowers, I use 'em...in conjunction with gravity... blow the debris loose with the blower while holding the item upside down, and you got a pretty good idea where the debris will go....IT FALLS DOWN.

Having had a camera strap break and send my camera with tamron 80-210 (we're talking sometime ago!) crashing to onto stone paving , I was glad to have had a UV filter on the front which bore the brunt of the impact. It smashed, leaving minimal damage to the lens itself.

I am happy to have something on the front of lens!

Andy

Opposite experience myself, camera toppled off a gadget bag - a whole 8 inches onto a carpeted floor, and expensive 1A filter smashed all over the front element causing a lot of scratches. Never, ever again will I consider these things as 'protection'. Protection perhaps against inept cleaning.

I'm intrigued by your logic,though "It smashed, leaving minimal damage to the lens itself". Your lens was damaged but you think it might have been worse without the filter?