the lens hood is a worthy purchase (protects from light, bumps, rain and all sorts of other stuff), shame on canon not providing them for non L lens...

if your hiking or anythign like that mightbe a good idea to get a uv for lens protection esp. if you got some L glass

without a filter you wont get weather sealing on those few L-lenses that have weather seals

hmm I kinda noticed that my camera would have problem focusing sometimes when I was trying to focus on the shadows while pointing directly into the sun if that makes sense lol. I wonder if it was caused by the filter I am using.
Well it's kinda hard to find a good filter because there are like a million of them out there and I don't even know the filter I am using now is good or not. It does have a fancy name though, Hoya HMC Super UV (0) lol.

I bought a hood for my lens last summer because I heard that it both protects the front part of the lens and eliminate flare but I guess it doesn't help at all when you point the lens directly at the sun. Btw do you get flares while pointing your camera at the sun using your L lenses?



yeah... it's like paying almost 50 bucks for a piece of plastic

This post was edited by Futurama on Mar 22 2009 04:53pm

Ive got a Canon 10-22 mm and a B+W 110 ND filter ( 9 stops) which is so dark that you have to focus before you put the filter on and lock it there, looking through you camera with the filter on is just black.

Btw normally for landscape pictures i use my Cokin with 3 stop GND

Not that would be very... argh! I'd find that frustrating to do each time

yeah but it's actually really cool, you can get really long shutter speeds even in daylight.

oh! so there are filters for taking long exposure shots in day light??? I would like to get one

my filters cost less than15$
they might be cheap but they dont reduce the sharpness performance,
and in any case if it did, then its probably just that you have a poopy camera

plus it protects my lens

Cheap "uv filters" are basically just a piece of glass to "protect" then lens.
I guess it does work at protecting (If you drop it, the filter would get scratched and not the front lens glass)
However, filters do cause focusing problems AND reduce quality.
The reason is because instead of the very small bits of dust or w/e that is always on the front of a lens, where it is not focusable...is now placed
a few mm away from the lens...so the lens now has to focus through this distracting particles, and the particles also cause it
to lose sharpness quickly.

I noticed my 28mm Wide having focus problems with the UV filter on it yesterday...
I would focus in, but is just kept trying, and not focusing... (Eg, the USM just kept going in...out....in....out...)
I took the filter off and it focused on the first attempt.