Filters

[denizg7]

Hi guys,

I am about to buy a single coated lens just for b&w and see the shadows smear. My question is , there are some filters that say they make black and white images more dynamic etc , is this marketing , or is this for multi coated lenses or for single too?

any ideas , thanks

Dennis

 

[Overkill-F1]

I like to use a medium yellow filter (K2) with b&w film and on any of my lenses, old or new, multi or single coated.
What do you mean "and see the shadows smear"?
...Terry

 

[denizg7]

well i looked at some samples of single coated and multi coated lenses and the shadows in the single coated seamed like they were lightly painted in some areas , where as multi coated it seemed blocks of shadow

 

[sevo]

well i looked at some samples of single coated and multi coated lenses and the shadows in the single coated seamed like they were lightly painted in some areas , where as multi coated it seemed blocks of shadow

That won't be a coating issue, if it isn't haze, it will be the lens design - 40 years after the move from single to multicoating, most MC lenses you'll run across are decades younger than the SC ones, it is not that often that you encounter one lens in both coating versions for a comparison.

In the few cases where I have a single- and multicoated version of the same lens (e.g. the Symmar-S series and the Nikkor 1.4/50), I can observe no discernible difference other than a mild loss of contrast on high-contrast subjects. More significant differences would theoretically be observable on wide zooms, superzooms and other modern lens designs with a very high element (and hence glass/air surface) count. If they existed in a SC version, that is - lenses with that many groups were only made feasible by the introduction of multicoating and did not exist before.