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Filter Recommendation - Antlia Triband or Quad Band?

Antlia Triband RGB Ultra Filter - 2.00'' Mounted ZWO ASI585MC Pro Equipment Filters Buying Advice
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Which Filter?
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59% (20 votes)
29% (10 votes)
12% (4 votes)
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Jean-David Gadina avatar
Jean-David Gadina avatar
I'm looking to buy a filter for deep-sky imaging.
For now, I'd like to keep things simple and avoid taking different sets of pictures with different filters.

I've seen some forum posts praising the quality of Antlia filters, and these two seem interesting to me:

They seem identical for H-alpha, S-II, O-III, and NII, the only difference being H-beta in the quad-band version.

I've read somewhere that H-beta is usually considered useless.
So, is there any advantage to using the quad-band version?

For more information, I'm located in a Bortle 6 area.
I'm currently using a Celestron NexStar Evolution 6 with either a Canon EOS R7 or a ZWO ASI585MC Pro.

Feel free to recommend different filters if necessary.
Thanks a lot!
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Alain Leclercq avatar
Alain Leclercq avatar
I recently purchased the triband and it does an incredible job, even with moonlight. You can check my last photos.
I would say that the triband provide maybe more contrast.
Cheers
Alain
Markus Selbach avatar
Markus Selbach avatar
I can definitely recommend the Triband. I haven‘t tried the Quadband but I‘m sure they both are a good choice.
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Oskari Nikkinen avatar
Oskari Nikkinen avatar
I have the Triband, and its been good as a general purpose easy to use semi-narrowband filter. The band passes are quite wide, so its not the best full Moon or high light pollution area tool, but i think you'll be all right with it in bortle 6. The colour palette it tends to skew towards is on the blue-green side of things (because essentially all yellow is blocked), but its nothing some processing cant deal with. Looking at the bandpasses of the Quadband it looks similar, although cant confirm since i dont have it.

For the quadband, you'd need to make sure your scope can handle the infrared portion optically. Not all correctors and especially lensed scopes deal with IR too well, i'd recommend you test that by shooting without a UV/IR cut filter first and see if its ok if you wanted to use the Quadband. Also, if your DSLR is unmodified you would not get anything out of that extra IR pass at the end, because the default IR blocking filter passes none of it. No such issue with the 585, but keep that in mind if you wanted to use both cameras.
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Rafael Amarins avatar
Rafael Amarins avatar
I chose the triband over the quad. Both bandpasses <430nm and >680nm are detrimental to chromatic aberration which is one of the main reasons I bough it - to cut bandpasses that would cause chromatic aberration on my apo/semi apo refractor. These bandpasses are very unusual and I would say useless for regular astrophotography. 
Under bortle 6 skies the Triband is a good allround choice for not so dim reflection nabulae and not so dim galaxies. For dim stuff even under bortle 6 maybe you're better off with UV/IR cut or something like a CLS-CCD or even better a L-PRO. 
Under bortle 4/5 I got better results using UV/IR cut when shooting reflection nebulae and galaxies. A mid term like a L-PRO would be nice but I already have too many OSC filters at this point still I think it should be a good comprimise between UV/IR cut and the Triband.
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Itto Ogami avatar
Itto Ogami avatar
Just FYI the Triaband Ultra II has been released that includes the H beta now. I just bought one from woodland hills. I had the original triband and used it on numerous images in the last year. I needed a 2nd one and saw there was now an ultra II. Since my 2600 camera has a built in UV/ir cut, it removes the signal from the infra red that the quad lets thru anyway. other than that its basically the same filter as the triband. Even if the 2600 didnt have a uv/ir filter i would want to stay away from the ir personally to prevent bloating of stars.
Jean-David Gadina avatar
Jean-David Gadina avatar
Thanks a lot for the feedbacks folks! 🙏
i just purchased the tri-band version.
Jon Rista avatar
Jon Rista avatar
Looking at the quad band chart, I honestly do not understand why it has the two passes at around 400nm and around 780nm. Why do those two passes exist at all? All the other bands of interest are captured in the two middle passes, so there seems to be no reason for the other two passes…. What are the consequences of also passing those two other ranges?

The tri-band also seems to pass around 425-450, which doesn't make much sense either. 

There are two deeper hydrogen emissions…but, i don't think either of these filters would actually capture them, or at least not capture them well, assuming they are even emitted at anything beyond trivial levels by hydrogen nebula.
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