Camera lenses come with different lens diameters at the front of the lens. Chances are, if you’ve got a couple of lenses in your camera bag, you’ll need a couple of different-sized screw-in filters to fit them.
Ideally, you’d have a set of perfectly sized filters for the diameter of each lens in your kit. But that’s not practical or cost-effective most of the time — good-quality filters aren’t cheap! Carrying three or four polarizer filters, for example, can be pricey and cumbersome.
So if you don’t have a specific filter size that you need for your lens’s diameter, a good option is to use a step-up filter. They’re sometimes also called stepping rings or adapter rings.
Not to be confused with lens adapters (or lens mount adapters), which let you put one type of lens mount on a camera body that has a different style of lens mount.
All step-up or step-down rings do is adapt the diameter of the filter to match the lens diameter.
They don’t have any glass or electronics, so they have no bearing on the optical quality or features like autofocus.1
Which to Use When?
– Step-Up: Small Lens Thread -> Big Filter (e.g., 52mm Lens -> 77mm Filter). Safe to use.
– Step-Down: Big Lens Thread -> Small Filter (e.g., 77mm Lens -> 52mm Filter). Causes vignetting.
Things worth knowing about step-up & step-down rings
- Rings usually have two numbers printed on them (e.g., “52-77”). The first number is almost always the lens side (male thread), and the second number is the filter side (female thread).
- Step-Up/Step-Down rings don’t work well with lens hoods, so you’ll likely have to do without the hood.
- As with regular filters, don’t over-tighten them. If you do, there’s a good chance you’ll damage the lens’s thread. If they do get stuck, you can use a rubber band or filter wrench to undo them.
- There’s no optical quality to the filters — there’s no glass in them. So the price isn’t about optical quality — it’s about the construction of the ring itself. The cheapest, and flimsiest, are plastic. I much prefer metal filters to plastic ones. They’re just more durable, especially the threads.
- But there’s another distinction. When choosing metal, cheap aluminum rings can bind (get stuck) easily against aluminum lens threads. Brass rings (like those from Sensei or higher-end brands) are much less likely to bind.
- It is possible to stack these rings to get to a size that no single ring can do, but it increases the chance of vignetting. And it’s less than ideal to push the filter glass further away from the lens itself — it just increases the risk of optical issues from dust or smudges on the filter.
Pro strategy: Buy big
Buy filters for your largest lens (e.g., 77mm or 82mm) and use step-up rings for all your smaller lenses. This saves you from buying multiple expensive polarizer or ND filters.
Where to find them
You can buy them individually or in kits like this one.
Lens filter size charts
I’ve compiled some lens filter size charts, starting with some of the most commonly used and current lenses. You can find the corresponding chart here:
- Canon lens filter sizes chart
- Nikon lens filter sizes chart
- Sony lens filter sizes chart
- Fujifilm / Fujinon lens filter sizes chart
- Olympus / OM System lens filter sizes chart
- Pentax lens filter sizes chart
- Sigma lens filter sizes chart
- Tamron lens filter sizes chart
Notes & References:
- An exception to the optical quality is if you’re using a filter that’s smaller than the lens diameter, in which case there’s a strong chance you’ll get vignetting around the edges and corners of the frame. [↩︎]
