Neutral Density Filter Shootout

In this video our colleague Patrick Hall from Fstoppers test a bunch of neutral density filters including Formatt Hitech, B+W, Breakthrough, Tiffen, and Hoya to see which one have the least color cast, vignetting, and exposure differences.

So this kind of test should look rather familiar to some of you as we have done something very similar with the Syrp Variable ND Filter we reviewed here only recently. On this one Hall takes a pretty similar approach for looking at some non variable ND filters from a number of more (and somewhat less) known manufacturers.

You can check out the exact setup Hall used on this article. But here are the contenders in the video:

Hoya 82mm ProND64 Filter – $88
Tiffen 82mm Neutral Density 1.8 Filter – $139
Formatt Hitech 82mm HD ND 1.8 Filter – $101
B+W 82mm 1.8 ND MRC 106M Filter – $286
Breakthrough Photography 82mm x3 Solid Neutral Density 1.8 Filter – $189

They are all 82mm so you will need to fit them to an 82mm lens or a smaller one with a step up adapter ring.

Other than that the test showed that all of them are not far away from each other by much but hall reached the conclusion that the Breakthrough X3 is probably the best bang for the buck filter out of this group – we are hoping to test it ourselves later this year.

Over the years we published quite a few videos on using ND filters which you can check out here.

You can check out more of videos from our photography gear guides section here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.