Variable ND test - This will open a can of worms.

[Mark Toia]

Lets get this straight...
I get this same look when I stack to many ND's in front of the lens.

So lets be fair to the little VND.

 

[Nick Gardner]

You get better results using two high quality polas. I 've been using a tiffen and a schnieder and they look petty good. You have to rotate both of them together to get the desired polarizing effect in addition to the nd.

Nick

 

[Tom Gleeson]

Wow. I imagined due to the nature of the VND it would cut all frequencys equally. That is obvuisy not the case and I am suprised how strong the effect is. It looks like an IR filter. Would the use of a IR cut filter in conjunction with the VND work or is there something else happening apart from IR pollution? Thanks for testing.

 

[Phil Holland]

I ran away from Variable NDs. I have 4 different brands and none of them "do anything good" after 50mm IMO. I've tested a bunch of ND filtration at this point and I've gone with the Formatt Hot Mirror/ND combo filters. I would highly recommend those.

 

[Mark Toia]

I ran away from Variable NDs. I have 4 different brands and none of them "do anything good" after 50mm IMO. I've tested a bunch of ND filtration at this point and I've gone with the Formatt Hot Mirror/ND combo filters. I would highly recommend those.

Couldn't agree more..

 

[Phil Holland]

*High Five!*

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

$400 Heliopan seems to work a treat...

$400 Heliopan seems to work a treat...

We haven't really dug into the grade yet but I have been using a Heliopan Variable ND and getting pretty decent results. As you can imagine the color shift is much more subtle around 3 stops than 6, but just a 10 second primary grade in good ol' RCX-Pro was enough to convince me a proper colorist on a Scratch system could clean it right up. I'll tell you in a couple of weeks if I was correct or overly optimistic ,-)

Cheers - #19

 

[Mark Toia]

6 stops is not really an issue with them.... You can clean it up quite easy.
Thats a n1.2 and a n6...

10 stops is.... YUK!

 

[Pawel Achtel]

Mark, that's exactly as I would expect. I've been saying this on countless posts on this board as this subject is coming up quite often.

Also, try to put that filter on a wide angle lens and point to the lovely clear Australian blue sky and see what happens...