Ebay polarising filters?

[Dan_1981]

Anyone any experience of the cheaper filters on ebay?

After a 52mm polarising filter at the moment. £32 quid from Jessops.... £5 and up from ebay?

[Dogsey]

I bought one a while back, seriously degraded the image quality. Everything looked out of focus, I thought my brand new lens had packed up focusing! Took the filter off and everything was back to normal.

If somethings seems too good a bargin to be true, it probably is.

[LongQ]

What Dogsey said in terms of quality which is especially noticable with Polarising performance.

In fact I bought one from a high street retailer under their own name - but it's a Cokin. Not as effective, or so it seems, as my very old linear Hoya is on the film cameras. On the other hand it performed quite well in bright sunlight in the south of France on my point and shoot.

Bear in mind that a Pol filter means you can lose up to 2 stops - maybe more - and on naturally slower lenses (full aperture) this may compromise the auto focusing ability of the camera to some extent. You also need to be sure that what you get is a Circular Polariser, not a linear one, for digital systems compatibility.

[GetCarter]

Yep. You DEF get what you pay for in this regard.

Forget cheap. Buy quality. Even with a £75 jobbie, I have to be pretty careful how I use it.

This (taken this morning and now in the digital bin), even in bright sunlight at 500 ISO was 1/60th sec

[rottie102]

GetCarter said:

Yep. You DEF get what you pay for in this regard.

Forget cheap. Buy quality. Even with a £75 jobbie, I have to be pretty careful how I use it.

This (taken this morning and now in the digital bin), even in bright sunlight at 500 ISO was 1/60th sec

OT Is it just me thinking that GC should be banned for posting those pictures when for most of us the best landscape we see everyday looks like this:



On topic though - don't you guys think that close to the polarising filter effect is achievable in post processing?

Edited by rottie102 on Thursday 26th August 18:34

[LongQ]

rottie102 said:

OT Is it just me thinking that GC should be banned for posting those pictures when for most of us the best landscape we see everyday looks like this:

Well, I don't see how that could be since he binned the image and I assume you did the same for yours. So that makes things equal. Sort of.

You did bin your image didn't you?