Pimp My Canon EOS 6D: Mosaic Engineering Anti-Aliasing Filter

The Canon EOS 6D (price & specs) is selling very well, and it is on the way to become a highly popular camera. Canon’s entry level full-frame DSLR has a lot of good points: noise performance (even better than the Canon EOS 5D Mark III (price & specs)), the price (currently available at $1899  – Amazon | B&H | Adorama – for the body only, and $2499 – Amazon | B&H | Adorama – for the 6D with the EF 24-105 f/4L IS lens), outstanding image quality, and then. But everything comes for a price, and Canon made some compromises on the EOS 6D, foremost not featuring the advanced AF system of the EOS 5D Mark III, and holding back the excellent moiré and aliasing filters sported on the 5D Mark III.

Indeed, the EOS 6D, while having a very high image quality (on par with the EOS 5D Mark III), suffers from much more moiré and aliasing artifacts than its bigger sibling. That’s where the Mosaic Engineering anti-aliasing comes into play. They develop such filters for Canon and Nikon DSLRs since long. Now they made one for the Canon 6D, the VAF-6D. They made a video (spotted by DSLR News Shooter) to show the capabilities of the filter.

These are the first video clips demonstrating our new VAF-6D – which corrects the HD video aliasing and moire artifacts of the Canon 6D!

By the way, as with all our VAF-series filters, there’s no significant light loss with this filter: The variation in exposure among the different segments in the video, is due to the highly variable lighting – very wild partly-cloudy skies that day! Beautiful skies, though – so we didn’t want to overexpose them… To give the most valid comparison, we purposely kept the aperture and other imaging and processing parameters exactly the same among all the shots, so the video brightness varies with the cloud cover.

The filter doesn’t appear to lower resolution. There is, however, a small drawback when using the filter. Dan Chung from DSLR News Shooter reports:

There is also a shift to the back-focus setting of the lens, which means that the distance scale will be rendered inaccurate. Early versions of the filter for the 5D mkII also had very soft and dark corners with wide angle lenses. Mosaic claim to have improved both back-focus shifts and wide angle performance with a new second version for the 5D mkII. The 6D version should share these improvements but I haven’t tested it.

Mosaic Engineering’s filter isn’t really cheap. It costs $365 and can be ordered in their online store. We have to wait for more test to see if the EOS 6D with the filter can hold up to more expensive full-frame gear, like the EOS 5D Mark III. In any case, Mosaic Engineering’s filter is welcome accessory that will be of great interest for all those photographers and videographers who own an EOS 6D and want to get rid of moiré and aliasing artifacts. Even if the filter isn’t really cheap, for people on a budget it makes a good alternative to a $3150 5D Mark III, when bundled with the EOS 6D .

Canon EOS 6D price check: B&H Photo, Adorama, Amazon USA, Amazon Canada, Canon Canada, Canon USA Canon EOS 5D Mark III price check: B&H Photo, Adorama, Amazon USA, Amazon Canada, Canon Canada, Canon USA [DSLR News Shooter via nofilmschool]