Before you spend a bunch of money on an expensive indie filter, it may pay to check into cheaper alternatives, and some of the cheapest are the newer branded variable indie filters. These show up under various brand names like Polaroid Optics or Best Deal USA, but they're all the same, and the newer 52mm only cost me $12. So let's see what you get for your money. Tested on a Panasonic GH2 with the 14-42mm kit lens, I'll be looking at the usable attenuation range for both the minimum and maximum zoom, any degradation and sharpness, and finally any tenths or color shifts. The first thing I notice is that the minimum and maximum marked on the filter don't exactly correspond to the actual minimum max. The min being at the fourth dot, and the max being halfway between the x and max and the left point of that arrow. To find the usable range, I took a sequence of photographs starting with no filter, then into the filter at its minimum setting, jumping to the final dot, and then incrementing in small repeatable steps. Here are the results of those exposures taken on a flat field at 14mm, which is a 28mm full frame equivalent. The first picture is without the filter, and you can see the vignetting from the lens. The final exposure of 7.6 stops down shows the inherent non-uniformity of a variable ND filter. The fifth and sixth exposures would be acceptable for real scene, and were taken at 4 and 6 seconds respectively. Without the filter, the camera meter did at one tenth of a second, which means these two exposures were down 5.3 and 5.9 stops. At 42mm things look much better. Exposure is flat all the way down to the last row, where the GH2 didn't have enough light to properly meter. With a little exposure compensation, we can see that the seventh image is still good, and the eighth is acceptable. That's more than 7 stops of attenuation. So a safe setting at 14mm is about 5.3 stops down here, and at 42mm 7 stops down here. Now let's take a look at sharpness. This is a 100% crop of the 14 to 42mm lens at 42mm with focus on the P. And now with the filter. This is a one second exposure as compared to the one 400th of a second without. Without again, and with. There is a difference, but it's extremely subtle. Pretty impressive for such a cheap filter. All the images so far have been auto-white-balanced in raw therapy, which is hidden a small, bluish color shift by the filter. This is easily correctable with a slight temperature and tan adjustment. So the kneewear variable indie filter is incredibly cheap, incredibly sharp, and offers from 5 to 7 stops of light attenuation depending on your field of view. There's little reason not to give this filter a try.