Gorilla Glass Used to Make the World’s Toughest UV and CPL Filters
Photographers often use UV filters to protect the front element of their lenses, but tests have shown that impacts that shatter your filter will likely to damage your lens as well. Aurora Aperture wants to change that: they’ve created the world’s toughest filters by using Gorilla Glass.
Both filter lines are made using Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and both pass the Drop Ball Test used by the FDA to test eyeglasses and sunglasses. The test involves dropping a 0.56 ounce steel ball from 50 inches onto the glass, which must not fracture to pass.
“Traditional UV filters made from normal glass are unable to pass this test, some even fail with less than half of the test weight at 0.25 ounce,” Aurora Aperture says. “The Aurora PowerUV protection filters not only pass the test at the standard weight of 0.56 ounce, they even pass at 2 ounces which is 3.5 times of the standard weight.”
On the technical side of things, the PowerUV filter achieves a 99.6% light transmission rate, putting the filters on par with other premium lens glass.
The Aurora PowerCPL features an anti-lockup design that prevents it from getting stuck on lens threads like other thin-profile CPL filters.
Available filter thread sizes are 105mm, 95mm, 86mm, 82mm, 77mm, 72mm, 67mm, 62mm, 58mm, 55mm, 52mm, 49mm, 46mm, 43mm, 40.5mm, 39mm, and 37mm.
Aurora Aperture is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to launch these new filters. A 77mm PowerUV filter costs $82 and a 77mm PowerCPL costs $125. Kickstarter backers will receive their filters — assuming everything goes as planned — in September 2016.
