Lee Big Stopper 10 stop v’s B+W 10 stop review

Well after pour­ing rain and then totally clear sky’s all the right ele­ments fell into place to put the Lee Big Stop­per to the test and to com­pare it to the B+W 3.0 (10 stop) ND screw in filter.

With my ini­tial review on the fil­ter I have based my test­ing on the images pro­duced dur­ing the mid­dle of the day and I just wanted to show the fil­ters basic dif­fer­ence from the B+W 3.0 (10 stop). Also I have shot the images with the Canon 5D MkII on the 24 — 70 f2.8 lens so I may make the odd ref­er­ence to some of the sys­tems with that cam­era setup. All my test­ing is done on my hard­ware cal­i­brated mon­i­tor. So you may have dif­fer­ent results if your not calibrated.

First impres­sions:

First off for all those who are look­ing to buy one, the fil­ter comes wrapped in tis­sue paper with a spe­cial seal “Warn­ing to not accept it, if the seal is bro­ken” not sure what that is about but any­way it comes with its own black padded bag which is nice. The fil­ter is glass which is great (wish the ND grad fil­ters were). The fil­ter inserts eas­ily into the Lee fil­ter holder and the spe­cial foam to make it light tight rubs gen­tly on the fil­ter holder which gives me the impres­sion that wor­ry­ing about foam com­ing off over time due to use isn’t an issue. At first inspec­tion when the fil­ter is inserted you might think it wont be light tight but when you clip it onto the adapter ring it is. But I will be totally con­vinced when I see my film shots with the filter.

It’s com­par­i­son to the B+W 3.0 (10 stop) screw in filter:

Straight out of the cam­era you will instantly see that the Big Stop­per is cooler over the B+W fil­ter by exactly 1000 kelvin accord­ing to Adobe Cam­era RAW (ACR). Big Stop­per is 5580K and B+W is 4580. Whats weird is how the B+W’s image looks warmer but has a cooler colour temp and vise versa, but makes sense if you think about it. With each of these shots they are straight out of the cam­era and where cap­tured on Auto White Balance.

Now whats worth not­ing is what hap­pens if you adjust the colour temp by 1000 k in each shot in ACR. So for the Big Stop­per I will change it from 5580 to 6580 (this is to warm it up to match the B+W image) and with the B+W I have changed it from 4580 to 3580 to cool it to match the Big Stop­per. The results are in the next two images.

I per­son­ally found the Big Stop­per warmed bet­ter and the B+W cooled bet­ter in ACR. Now that’s weird… but sub­ject to per­sonal taste.

When shoot­ing with the Big Stop­per and then chang­ing it with the B+W with the same expo­sure set­tings there is neg­li­gi­ble change in the his­togram espe­cially in the area of it either bright­en­ing or dark­en­ing the image.

Auto focus with the Big Stop­per either with the AF-On but­ton in live view or the old fash­ioned way I found is the same… almost impos­si­ble. So man­ual live view focus­ing or with­out the fil­ter is the way to go. Whats great with the Big Stop­per was on my first shot with it I acci­den­tally left the cam­era on Auto focus so when I went to take the shot it started to search for a focus point. Fix­ing this error was sim­ple, pulled the fil­ter out, focused and I was back in action. Mak­ing this error with the B+W is a pain in the ass, even more so if you have the lee fil­ter kit with a ND grad in there as well.

This is my first shoot with the fil­ter and on first impres­sions and results I think it is a great prod­uct with no faults. If you already owned a B+W 10 stop I would only buy the Big Stop­per if you wanted the free­dom of a slide in and out 10 stop fil­ter and the abil­ity to reduce vignetting that may result if you have the B+W screwed in and then the Lee Fil­ter sys­tem attached.

What about on film:

I also shot images on slide film with the Fuji G617 with both 10 stop fil­ter sys­tems. I have a sus­pi­cion that one will be clearly bet­ter over the other and see­ing that it is film it wont have the RAW flex­i­bil­ity for adjust­ment. After see­ing the results on dig­i­tal and also from shoot­ing long expo­sure with the B+W 10 stop on slide film before I think the B+W will come out on top over the Big Stopper.

Matt Lauder is the edi­tor of the Rub­bing Pix­els web­site and is a full time land­scape pho­tog­ra­pher based on the Cen­tral Coast of NSW. To view Matt’s full pro­file and the range of video he has con­tributed to the site please click here.