Welcome to my Patrick Di Fruscia 100mm Pro essentials filter kit review
I have been using Formatt Hitech filters for five years now and you will probably know I was so vocal about how much I loved their products that I was asked to be a brand ambassador for their products. Last year I was made a Featured Artist and photography educator for their products also.
Over the years I have purchased a total of 5 other filter systems and I just wasn’t happy with any of them. Until I found the Firecrest filter holder and their great range of filters.
The advantage of all this is you get to buy the Pro 100mm kit for only £299.29 delivered to your door from Formatt Hitech’s website with Discount code . The discount code gets you 10% off the Ultra kit also or in fact any Formatt Hitech products. So it’s great news for me and my clients.
So why do I love these products so much?
Well I have used them now for years and they are the best filters I have ever used, they are both robust and colour neutral and the kit now includes the new Firecrest Magnetic 100mm filter holder. I have a video below showing what’s in the box, how to set it up and how to use it.
Why buy this kit?
Well, it’s a good starter kit and it comes with the amazing Firecrest filter holder and two great filters. So let’s have a look at what you get.
Contents…
1.-Firecrest 100mm filter holder.
1.- Firecrest ND1.2 (4 stops) Great for shorter long exposure photographs.
1.-Firecrest ND Soft Edge Grad 0.9 (3 stop) Graduated filter a great graduated filter to help balance most images.
1.-Circular polarising filter.
3.- Adaptor rings incl.. 72mm and 77mm adaptor threads and both a 82mm and 86mm rotating ring. My video above explains what these are for as well as how to use the holder.
1.- Filter wallet
Now priced at £326.99 +£5.- shipping totalling £331.99 it’s good value for money but if you enter discount code HAYES10 at checkout you get 10% off so it’s just £299.29 delivered to your door.
At £299.29 for a filter holder, 2 filters, 2 adaptor rings, 2 rotating rings, a magnetic CPL, magnetic lens cap and a filter wallet it’s fantastic value for money.
Getting back to the products themselves.
As you can see from the video above the holder is fantastic, you get a polarising filter, 3 adaptor rings and the extra light shields with the filter holder.
I have a video at the very bottom of this page on how to set up the Firecrest filter holder.
The 3 stop Graduated filter is great for balancing out those sunset shots and darkening down the sky while leaving the foreground correctly exposed.
The second filter, the 1.2ND or 4-stop ND filter is good to slow down your shutter speed if you want to do shorter long exposures.
The Firecrest filter holder is a beautiful bit of kit, with the extra light shield adaptors you can actually stack ND filters. Yes, you can use the 4 & 10 stop filters together at the same time making it a 14 stop filter. Again the extra light shields help protect your filters from sea spray and light rain, for a real in-depth review of the Firecrest filter holder click here where I go into a lot more detail.
Firecrest Pro filters
The Firecrest Pro series of filters are colour neutral, incredibly hard-wearing and the sharpest filters I have ever used (just like the Ultra’s). So what’s the hard-wearing part about? A filter is a filter, right? Well, that’s wrong… The way the Firecrest filters are made they actually sandwich the ND coating in between two slivers of glass. Yes, the filters are made of two thin sheets of glass and not one. This has two advantages. Firstly the ND coating can’t be scratched as it’s protected by glass on both sides and secondly due to the construction of the bonded glass it makes the filters more resilient to damage than a standard filter.
I have an in-depth review of the Firecrest Pro filters here