Product Description

One of the reasons of the Cokin success story is that Cokin is permanently in close contact with both professional and amateur photographers and videographers, so as to listen to their ideas and precise needs. The products launched by Cokin are therefore always perfectly adapted to real needs.

Product Details

• Brand: Cokin
• Model: P120
• Dimensions: .15 pounds

Customer Reviews

OK for beginners, don't like the color cast!
The whole series of Cokin neutral density filters suffers from a major problem... color cast. When I first started using these, I kept wondering why all of my pictures came out tinged in an ugly magenta-brown shade. One day I broke my Cokin graduated ND filter, so I replaced it with a Singh-Ray - what a world of difference!

See, even though these are called 'neutral' density, note that they are also called 'grey'. That should be a clue that they aren't truly neutral after all. The tradeoff is that high quality NDs such as the Singh-Ray will run you about a hundred bucks.

If you're not overly serious about photography, you can get away with the Cokin filters and try and correct for the color in Photoshop. However, for more serious photographers, or amateurs who appreciate higher quality, the more expensive filters are definitely worth the expense.

Also, the Cokin filters are made of cheap resin, which tends to scratch and / or break more easily than the expensive glass filters...

A must for advanced amateurs
If you're an avid landscape photographer, particularly a 35mm film user, and you don't have a graduated ND filter, you've already had the frustration of balaning exposure for highlights, shadow, and mid-tones. Simply put, you can get the sky exposed properly, or you can get the landscape exposed properly but you can't get both -- at best you can average/bracket. The ND solves your problem, by gradually increasing density from nothing (clear glass) to a fairly dark neutral grey. Take your meter reading from the landscape, set your ND filter so that the graduation sits appropriately with the skyline, and voila! you've got the exposure you see with your eye and in your mind, properly balanced for highlights and dark tones. No more blown out highlights.

I'm a (relatively) new DSLR user, and though it's certainly true that I could take two frames (one for sky, one for land) and combined the correct exposures with Adobe Photoshop, I've found that getting it right "at the source" is preferable.

The Cokin system is easy to use: attach an adapter to your lens, slide in the filter holder, and then slide in the rectangular Cokin filter. Cokin makes more filters than you could possibly need, but the grad ND (there are two, one lighter and one darker) are a great addition to you kit, and clearly indispensable for the film user. You can use the system with other filters (skylight, circular polarizer) since the adapter is so thin it doesn't cause vignetting. The only suggestion I have is to find a Cokin lens cap that allows you to leave the filter holder on your camera while still being able to cap your lens.

This is a teriffic addition to your photo equipment.