Leica 39E UVa filter or....?

M

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I need a couple of 39mm UV filters. Do you have a good and cheap place to buy these? .......it seems difficult to get them below $100?

I have seen that B+W makes a nice 39mm chrome filter which is much cheaper. Is this a good alternative? ......what do you use out there?
 
Al Kaplan said:
I skip the filter altogether unless I'm looking for a particular effect.
Click to expand...

Ok!
I just want to protect the soft coating on a DR Summicron. I was warned that the coating is soft on these lenses and right now the lens surface looks mint. Then I wanted a filter which as good as possible. But I was surprised that an original E39 costs more than $100. I am new into the Leica world......
 
B+W seems great for my lenses. But I have purchased quite a few used ones from the bay and they are all below US$30 each. No problems as well.

Cheers,
 
B+W works fine for me as well.
I would prefer them over the Hoya's who also make them by the way.
 
heliopans are the best made filters (Schott glass). The heliopans have up 16 layers of coating. I have a slew of heliopans, a few B+W and a couple Leica. Leicas are the least best and I never use them, but nice to have around.
 
The Leica filters are only single-coated and I believe are made by B+W, at least the glass is the B+W single-coated Schneider glass.
 
I've been buying the original Leitz Wetzlar E39 UvA filters, on the bay, in the $35 range. Actually I've recently purchased four of them this way.
 
If you have convinced yourself that you REALLY need a UV filter, go for the Heliopan. But a good lens hood will give your lens excellent protection, and a lot more.
 
Ok!
Thank you for the answers. I am a bit surprised that original Leitz are single coated only. Especially when looking at the price level on an original Leitz.
 
Back when Pentax started hyping their "seven layer multicoating" I asked the Leitz rep about it and why Leica wasn't multi-coating. He replied that they'd been doing it for years, as had other companies, but never thought it was out of the ordinary, certainly not something to build an entire marketing campaign on! He explained that the curvature of the elements in relation to one another has a lot to do with the severity of the reflections so not all lens surfaces required multi-coating, or at least not as many layers. He also said that several of the much heralded Seven Layers served no real optical function. One was applied because it bonded well to the glass, another because it made for a good hard scratch resistant coating on the external elements. The function of some others might be only to seperate two layers from one another, layers that actually had an optical function.
 
One of virtues extolled by B+W for their MRC filters is that the very outside coating is scratch resistant as described by Al above, but they don't go into detail in their literature about the function of each coat. I've used Hoya and B+W filters for a long time and can report that the B+W variety last longer. They also use brass rings rather than an alloy of some kind. Heliopan do too but I've just never used those filters. I should try a couple.
 
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