Toileum filter set

Toileum – not a name I had come across before. I was looking on Amazon for a yellow filter, having left mine behind in Europe thinking I had a spare set back in Japan but I was wrong. The only yellow filters I could find on Amazon (Japan) were around €20 then I saw this “Toileum 6pcs full color lens filter set…” for about €20 (featured image) including a lens brush, cleaning cloth and cleaning tissues.

Who are Toileum and who makes the filters? A little web searching showed Toileum was a trademark owned by Meizhou Lingshi Trading Co. Ltd based in Guangdong, a company trading in a range of consumer goods, primarily electronics but some optical equipment, so obviously not the manufacturer. There was no indication who the manufacturer was, and there are many manufacturers of high end medical optical instruments based in Guangdong but no obvious supplier of inexpensive filters for photography.

So should I risk €20 and buy a set to try? Well, as Ibraar Hussein knows, I am immensely wealthy so I decided to risk it all and buy a set.

I expected the six filters to arrive screwed into each other to minimise packaging costs but no, each filter had its own clamshell case. I checked one to make sure it did actually screw into my lens without jamming or falling to bits and it worked fine.

Taking the filters out my casual observation was that the orange filter seemed closer to standard reds than the orange filters I was used too, and the red filter looked more like a deep red. I have no equipment to test spectral response, and have no idea whether consumer filters are manufactured to specific spectral transmission curves or not (specialist scientific filters are manufactured to transmit a defined range of the spectrum). But anyway the yellow was indeed yellow, orange was a deep orange, and red a dark red, all fine by me, and I had little interest in the green, blue and purple filters. I checked the filter factors for each of these three filters by metering different scenes through the lens with and without the filter. The yellow required just a 0.5 stop adjustment, the orange 1.5 stops and the red 2 stops. The yellow factor is similar to that of my Hoya filter but the orange and the red are both almost a stop stronger, partly validating my casual observation. Ideally I’d like something between the yellow and orange but that will have to wait.

One issue I found on my Zeiss lenses, the bayonet mount hood would not go over the filter – the rim of the Toileum filters is marginally fatter than all other filters I have used. WORKAROUND: leave the lens protector filter in place, fit the hood then screw the Toileum colour filter into the lens protector filter. Not ideal but it works and allows simple change of colour filter without removing the hood.

Conclusion: the Toileum filters are so inexpensive it’s hard to say no, even if its just to have a spare set. The entire set cost no more than a single yellow filter from another manufacturer so for that alone the cost is justified.

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