Hoya Variable Density II 55mm adjustable grey filter

Hoya Variable Density II 55mm - 1-9 aperture dimming

Hoya Variable Density II 82mm stop is an updated version of Hoya's adjustable grey filter. The fairly comprehensive range of adjustment is cleverly limited to the very extreme where the problems of adjustable grayscreens arise.Even the ND400 can cope without colour aberration, vignetting or cross-polarisation. After all, these filters are mainly used for video, so it's particularly important not to get any headache-inducing chromatic aberrations in the material. Often cheap ND filters will leave a slightly greenish "film" on the image, still images can easily be corrected with a grey card. In video editing, however, this feature causes considerably more work and time.

What does 1 to 9 gaps mean?

Full gaps go like this: F1.2 | F2.0 | F2.8 | F4 | F5.6 | F8 | F11 | F16 | F22 | F32 | F45

A stop means basically one aperture or dividing the shutter speed by two, i.e. 2-5 stops is equivalent to dimming the camera by 2-5 apertures / or dividing the time by 2-5 times. As an example, let's take a very common 50mm f/1.4 lens, in bright sunlight the lens will produce a 1/50 stop and an aperture of f/22 at ISO 100. Of course, this is not the most desirable aperture for many people, so the amount of light entering the lens needs to be dimmed. Deciding that you want to set the aperture to f/4, you can now calculate from the columns above how many times you need to "stop down" to get to the desired aperture. The answer in this case is 5, so at this maximum aperture of the filter you will reach the desired aperture.

Main features

• 1-9 aperture dimming by adjusting
• Moderate adjustment range prevents chromatic aberrations and cross-polarisation
• No vignetting even with a 16mm full frame lens
• Best optical performance on the market
• Coating: multi-coating
• Material: aluminium, glass