How we ranked these: four criteria, in this order
Filters are the one gear category where the cheap option and the expensive option look identical and behave very differently, because what you are paying for is the absence of problems rather than the presence of features. These are the four things that decide it.
1. The right kind of ND for your job. This is the decision that sends most people home with the wrong filter. A variableND is two polarizers that rotate against each other, so you dial density continuously — perfect for video, where the light changes between shots and you cannot keep unscrewing glass. A fixed ND is a single piece of darkened glass at one density, and it is the only way to get the eight to ten stops a daytime long exposure needs. No variable ND on this page reaches 10 stops cleanly, and no fixed ND lets you adjust. Buy for the job, not for the flexibility.
2. Stop range, and specifically where the range starts. A 1-5 stop variable covers almost all video work and nothing else. A 2-8 stop variable adds short blur-the-water exposures at the top. A 3-7 stop filter like the Freewell cannot be wound back toward clear, which matters if you also shoot indoors with it fitted. And 1-9 stops on one rotation is physically asking a lot — the span is real, the quality at the top of it is not.
3. What goes wrong at maximum density. Every variable ND degrades as you wind it toward MAX, in two ways with two names. The X-shaped cross is a dark band across the frame that appears when the two polarizers approach perpendicular; it is most visible on wide-angle lenses and it is unfixable in post. The second is color cast— the magenta-and-green shift that makes footage a nuisance to grade. Manufacturers are blunt about this when it is their selling point: K&F advertises the Nano-X as having no X cross across its 1-5 stop range, and NiSi sells True Color glass specifically against the cast. Treat the presence of that claim as the spec, and its absence as a warning.
4. Thread size and ring thickness.Filters are bought per diameter, not per camera, and nothing about this is convenient. Check the number printed after the ø symbol on your lens barrel — our lens markings guide decodes the rest of it. Thickness matters too: a thick ring on a wide-angle lens puts the frame’s own corners in shadow. The Freewell is 5.45 mm in use, Tiffen publishes a 9 mm ring with a wider front optic specifically to fight that, and the K&F B-Series is sold as ultra-slim.
Buy one filter for your biggest lens, then step up
The most useful money-saving habit in filters: buy the filter in the largest thread size you own and adapt it down with step-up rings, which cost a few dollars each. A 67mm filter fits a 49mm lens with a 49-67mm step-up ring and loses nothing optically, because the filter is simply larger than it needs to be. The reverse — a step-down ring — vignettes, because you are putting a smaller hole in front of a bigger lens.
That is why 67mm is the diameter we have shown on five of these six listings. It is the most common thread on current APS-C standard zooms and fast primes, it is where the price curve is still reasonable, and it steps up to cover nearly everything smaller. If your longest or widest lens takes 82mm — many full-frame f/2.8 zooms do — buy 82mm and step up to it from everything else. Every filter here is sold in a range of sizes; the listing you click is one of them.
One warning about step-up rings and lens caps: once a step-up ring is fitted, your original lens cap no longer clips on. Buy a cap for the filter’s diameter at the same time, and keep the filter in the case the better options include.
What each stop actually buys you
A stop is a halving of light, and because the numbers compound fast it helps to see what each band is for.
1-3 stops: video in shade and overcast light. Enough to hold 1/50 s at f/2.8 under cloud or in the open shade of a building. This is the band you live in for interviews and indoor-to-outdoor walking shots, and it is the reason a filter that starts at 3 stops can be awkward as your only one.
3-6 stops: video in direct sun, and shallow depth of field in daylight stills. The heart of the range. Bright sun at f/1.8 needs most of it. Our video settings guide covers why the shutter is the fixed point in that equation and the aperture is not, and aperture explained covers what you are protecting by not stopping down to f/16.
6-8 stops: short daytime long exposures.A half second to two seconds — enough to turn a stream into motion and give a waterfall its soft texture without going fully abstract. This is the top of the Tiffen’s range and the realistic ceiling for a variable ND.
10 stops: the real long-exposure band. Thirty seconds at midday. Water becomes glass, cloud becomes streaks, and people walking through the frame disappear entirely. Only a fixed ND does this cleanly, which is the whole reason the Hoya PROND EX 1000 is on a page otherwise dominated by variables. Our long exposure photography guide covers the technique, and how to photograph waterfalls is the single most common reason people buy their first 10-stop filter.
ND or polarizer? They are not interchangeable
A circular polarizer also darkens the image — by roughly one to two stops, depending on angle — which leads people to use one as a weak ND. It works, but it is the wrong instrument, because a polarizer’s actual job is to cut reflections off glass, water and wet leaves and to deepen a blue sky, and that effect changes with how you are pointed. You cannot have polarization without the sky shifting, and you cannot avoid it on a variable ND, which is built out of polarizers in the first place.
That is what makes the Freewell hybrid genuinely useful rather than gimmicky: it gives you a second ring to aim the polarization deliberately instead of accepting whatever orientation the density setting happens to land on. The cost is that the polarizer can never be removed from the light path. If you want polarizing and ND as separate, removable decisions, the honest answer is a fixed ND plus a screw-in CPL — two filters, more vignetting risk, full control. Our camera filters explainer walks through every filter type and which ones a modern sensor has made obsolete.
Where we would spend the money
If you shoot video: buy the 1-5 stop no-cross variable ND in your largest thread size and stop there. That is the filter that will be on your camera 90 percent of the time, and the money saved by not buying the premium version is better spent on a decent tripod, which improves more shots than any filter.
If you shoot landscape stills: buy the 10-stop fixed ND first, not a variable. Everyone who buys a variable ND for long exposures discovers within a month that eight stops of variable range plus a cross pattern is not the same product as ten stops of clean fixed glass. Pair it with the wide-angle glass in our landscape lens roundup — and check the filter threads there before you choose a diameter, because ultra-wides are exactly the lenses where a thick filter ring shows.
If you shoot both: the 2-8 stop Tiffen is the honest compromise, and we would rather tell you it is a compromise than pretend one filter covers every job. And if you are not sure you will use an ND at all, the cheapest K&F is a genuinely sensible way to find out for the price of a couple of coffees — just keep it off the last third of its travel, and plan to replace it rather than regret it. Timelapse shooters should read how to shoot a time lapse before buying: a variable ND that drifts as you touch it is a specific problem in that discipline, and a fixed ND is usually the better tool.
