Well, if you’d been thinking about picking up Canon’s EF to RF drop-in filter adapter, Breakthrough Photography might’ve just made your decision a little easier. They’re the first third-party company to produce drop-in filters for the Canon adapter, and they’ve kicked off the range by launching a whole bunch of them at once!
Amongst the list of filters for your Canon full-frame mirrorless adapter are several circular polarisers (some with included ND) regular straight NDs as well as variable NDs, a Night Sky filter, infrared filter, a couple of clear filters and a number of interesting coloured polarisers specifically for shooting black and white.
The filters cover a multitude of uses for both stills and video use, and many of them are available in different levels of quality. The X4 circular polariser, for example, offers an increased light transmission over the X2 circular polariser (50.64% vs 42.44%). The X4 they say, also “moderately outperforms” Canon’s own drop-in CPL filter. But this extra light does come with an increased cost on the purchase price.
When it comes to the neutral densities, the X4 filters obviously don’t let more light through than the X2 (that would be silly), but Breakthrough Photography says that they do offer increased quality that they say outperforms “industry-leading manufacturers such as Singh Ray and B+W and Lee”, due to the increased colour neutrality of their effect.
Particularly interesting are the black & white CPLs, which come in yellow, green, orange and red varieties, each affecting the contrast of the scene hitting your sensor in the three colour channels in slightly different ways.
When shooting black & white film, I used coloured filters all the time to help even out skin tones and darken skies and I’ve used those filters occasionally with DSLRs that I knew I was going to turn into a black & white in post, and I was quite surprised at the difference they make with digital. Of course, the colour image is pretty useless, but if you know for sure that you’re going to be converting to black and white, these should prove quite useful.
There’s also the night sky filter to help cut through light pollution at night (a common problem for many parts of the world), as well as an infrared filter and a couple of clear filters – so that you don’t have to wonder about images shifting when you want to shoot multiple images on a locked off, manually focused camera for compositing with and without filters. On your “without” shot, just pop in the clear and you don’t need to worry about the refractive index of the filters in the other shots shifting the image or focus slightly.
All in all, it seems like a good variety that should keep Canon mirrorless shooters using EF lenses with the Canon drop-in filter adapter very happy.
The filters are available to pre-order through the Breakthrough Photography website either individually or in bundles (the bundles work out cheaper), and they’re expecting to start shipping in late September.
[via DPReview]
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