It is turning out that buying ND grads and other filters for m43s is harder than I expected. Just when I was ready to order a few hundred dollars of filters a post by Terry made me stop and think so I cancelled my order and I wanted to see if anyone had some good advice on using filters with m43s before I waste some money.
I did some reading today and found a few things that may work. For the Cokin system they make extension tubes to place between the lens and filter holder. This are apparently designed for another problem, but placing the filter holder out a bit further seems like it would help define the graduated transition more clearly at the expense of being a little more awkward. Does this seem like it would work?
Another option would be the Lee RF75 filter system. It seems like they are aware of the problem and the transitions in their filters happen much more quickly to work with the smaller lenses. On the other hand they call their filter system complete, but it hardly seems so. 1.2 and higher ND grads are missing, and ND filters beyond 0.9 are missing, as well as reverse grads. On the Singh-ray faq they write that they can apparently make custom smaller sizes for a price. I hope they can make the transition area more compact. There are a number of glass filters available on B&H, but they are generally 4mm thick rather than the normal 2mm Lee uses. I'm not sure if the RF system can take the spaces to accommodate the thicker filters, or add more slots up to three.
IR filters, hot mirrors, high level NDs seem awfully expensive. Unfortunately Lee's clip on polarizer ring also means you can't use other large size round filters and of course P-sized sprockets are out, so no Blue/gold polarizers etc.
My last resort would be to carry around the 12-60, but that defeats the purpose of having a small system.
Any thoughts or experiences with what will or more importantly won't work with m43s? Has anyone tried Hitech filters or another system and had good or bad luck?
I did some reading today and found a few things that may work. For the Cokin system they make extension tubes to place between the lens and filter holder. This are apparently designed for another problem, but placing the filter holder out a bit further seems like it would help define the graduated transition more clearly at the expense of being a little more awkward. Does this seem like it would work?
Another option would be the Lee RF75 filter system. It seems like they are aware of the problem and the transitions in their filters happen much more quickly to work with the smaller lenses. On the other hand they call their filter system complete, but it hardly seems so. 1.2 and higher ND grads are missing, and ND filters beyond 0.9 are missing, as well as reverse grads. On the Singh-ray faq they write that they can apparently make custom smaller sizes for a price. I hope they can make the transition area more compact. There are a number of glass filters available on B&H, but they are generally 4mm thick rather than the normal 2mm Lee uses. I'm not sure if the RF system can take the spaces to accommodate the thicker filters, or add more slots up to three.
IR filters, hot mirrors, high level NDs seem awfully expensive. Unfortunately Lee's clip on polarizer ring also means you can't use other large size round filters and of course P-sized sprockets are out, so no Blue/gold polarizers etc.
My last resort would be to carry around the 12-60, but that defeats the purpose of having a small system.
Any thoughts or experiences with what will or more importantly won't work with m43s? Has anyone tried Hitech filters or another system and had good or bad luck?