Square filters - Cokin vs Lee

[Alastair Moore]

I've got a Lee 100mm filter system, which I have a full set of hard and soft ND grads, and a 3 stop ND. I'm looking at getting some coloured filters (red, yellow, green, blue) so thought I'd probably pick up some Lee filters again. The reason I went for Lee filters in the first place was the colour cast Cokin and Hitech ND filters have, where as Lee do not (or not very much at all).

I'm wondering if the Cokin or Hitech coloured filters don't have so much of a colour cast, so I could pick a few up and save a few $$s. Does anyone have any experience with these other filters or should I continue with my "you buy cheap, you buy twice" philosophy?

[Lachlan717]

If you're getting coloured filters, then I'm assuming you intend to use them for B&W.

As such, colour cast is rendered moot.

I use Cokin X-Pro with no issues. I recently bought a cheap grad orange one From China. Arrive fine, and turns out it's a glass, not acrylic, base. Nice!

[Alastair Moore]

Hi Lachlan,

I was thinking that but was curious as to whether the cheaper filters have any other unwanted effects. Oh well, I might grab some of the Cokin ones in that case and give them a go.

Cheers!

Alastair

[Walter Glover]

I would be reluctant to use any of the above.

[Lachlan717]

Based on...?

[Walter Glover]

Just about all of the acrylic filters are made by a crowd in Wales. back when I used mountains of Sinar 4-inch and 5-inch filters I had occasion to talk to the chap in Wales. He told me that the CR39 comes in different grades, that Sinar used the second best grade and that no other photographic filters were using second best or better.

They degrade the image more than glass.

Further image degradation occurs with the very thick larger filters.

Acrylic filters can not be coated and so surface reflections are there to stay. When a number of filters are combined in the usual sort of holder with a series of slots, it is easy to get repeated images of bright areas or highlights. It was such a discovery that prompted me to speak to the guy.

Give me thin glass filters with high-end coating - multi-coating if possible. At the most I might put a grad in front of screw-ins and I'd try for a glass grad at that. From memory it was Tiffen or Singh Ray that might have made them.

Sinar pulled out of filters about 10 years ago but I would strongly favour Lee over Cokin.

[Lachlan717]

The following is simply my opinion of my photograhic needs and uses; it is not meant as an argument against the aforementioned opinions:

I simply do not have the ability to tell the difference in print quality between many of the purported high and low quality equipment in LF photography.

What you describe might be true (although I don't know why the French would buy filters from Wales), but I will never know/see the difference.

For me, much of this sort of debate is like the "pixel-peepers" in digital Pixelography and lmm chasers in lenses - theoretic and basically irrelevent to my final image. Things like film flatness, camera stability and even poor focus/poor movement application will cause me more problems than most filters.

As for colour cast? Given the vast majority of colour film is scanned, cast can be corrected in about 30 seconds in PS, so I don't worry about that at all. From what I have read, it mainly pertains to the Grads/ Neutral Grads. If you're worried, just avoid them. As I previously wrote, if these are for B&W, this "issue" is rendered moot.

[Alastair Moore]

I've never had any issue with Lee filters when I was using them with digital. I would stack filters (often up to three at a time) with no visible loss of quality so I'm really not concerned about image degradation. I think someone would have to have pretty good vision to see any serious degradation from Lee filters. I'm probably going to stick with Lee as I've been using them for a while and am confident enough on past experience to know I'll get good results from them. I only need three and I can get them fairly cheap from the UK.

Cheers for your thoughts anyway, chaps!

[Lachlan717]

If all things were equal, I'd get Schneider N-Grads.

However, with a 112mm front on my 72mm centre filter, a 100mm wide filter is (obviously) not enough. And $300+ each seems crazy.

The same is true for the Lee filters (well, widthwise, not pricewise).

So, I'm limited to the Cokin X-Pro Series sized filters. At least I can get Singh Ray reverse grads to fit!

[RoganJosh]

I agree with lachlan on this one. I have cheap $5 acrylic filters and expensive glass wratten filters and no human would ever tell the results apart.