Originally Posted by Wheatfield
Give that man a canoe! It used to be that i would put a filter on the lens if i thought there was a real risk to the front element, and then I just stopped worrying about it altogether.
When my A600/5.6 arrived, it had a huge 122mm Tamron UV filter on it. I decided that since I had spent mondo $$ on the lens, I would leave the filter on.
After I realized that the lens wouldn't take a sharp picture with the filter in place, I took it off. My wife uses it in a display cabinet now. It holds a little statuette of a Rottweiler lying down with his head between his front paws.
This is a much better use for it than what it was built for.
I went through the same thought process when I was having issues getting sharp images from a particular lens. I used to keep UV filters on all my important lenses but after removing it from this particular one, I noticed a marked improvement in the quality of the images. The UV's came off all the lenses. I only use UV's for what they were intended to be used for now, and it's only a quality UV filter at that!