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Kolari Vision is not the first company developing a UV transmitting bandpass filter. It is important to show the performance of this filter compared with its principal challengers. This article will compare the three following filters:
All these 3 lenses have their transmission peak centered on 365nm.
In this part, an UV torchlight with an inside 365nm Nichia LED is placed in front of a full-spectrum camera. We take pictures with each filter tested to show the UV light transmission through it. The parameters are not changing between each shot:
The goal here is to show the maximum level of UV signal coming on the sensor with the configuration given below. Here are the results:
This first comparison shows that the filters developed by Kolari Vision and UVIRoptics have very close UV transmission performance. The homemade stack of two filters is a bit set back and its maximum transmission level is lower than the two others.
In this part, the tree filter solutions have been used for outdoor and indoor shootings with, at each time, the same shooting parameters. Now than the theoretical performance has been tested, it is time to evaluate the concrete performance of each filter in term of exposure, contrast and sharpness.
The macro test is based on flower photography using UV bulb as UV light source.
The most contrasted and sharp of the three filters appears to be the Kolari UV transmitting bandpass filter. The LUV U2 filter has a good UV transmission but suffers from strong foggy effect affecting contrast and sharpness. The manual stack of Hoya U360 filter and Kolari hot mirror, at the opposite, has good contrast and sharpness but has a lower UV transmission impacting its exposure.
We are using Broncolor studio strobes on portrait photography for the shooting test.
As a result, the Kolari UV transmitting bandpass filter has the best rendering in term of sharpness, exposition and contrast.
In conclusion, the Kolari UV transmitting bandpass filter appears to be the best offer to practice ultraviolet photography. It offers maximum contrast and preserves sharpness with a good UV transmission rate.
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3 Responses
“What makes a good UV (bandpass) filter”
This article fails to specify the importance of IR rejection in a UV bandpass filter. The use of a hot mirror is typically only important when the UV bandpass filter has poor IR rejection. All UV bandpass filters I have tested leak IR to some extent but the good ones can be 6 to 7 stops below typical UV exposure parameters and do not require additional hot mirrors for IR rejection. IR leakage is a contrast killer for reflected UV images and results in the “foggy” appearance you reported above.
Hey. You are writing about taking pictures – the Hoya U360 homemade filter stack and the Kolari hot mirror. So you can simply install the Hoya U360 filter on an unmodified camera?
No, an unconverted camera has a UV blocking filter as well as an IR one. So it won’t work.