Seculine Vivicap Review v Grey Card v Auto White Balance V White Toilet Paper

A colleague of mine recently asked if I had tried a Seculine Vivicap white balance filter as an alternative to the ExpoDisc. I must admit I had never heard of them but popped out to my local camera store and purchased one. They come in various sizes from 52 mm to 77 mm. The 77 mm version cost £18.99 compared to £69.99 for an equivalent ExpoDisc.



The Vivacap replaces your lens cap and has been designed with wire handles which will let you remove the unit without having to take off your lens hood.

I set up a scene with some common household items in the hope you can reference these items and compare the colour. The same exposure was used throughout which was shutter 1/4, aperture 5.6 and ISO 200. All images were taken in raw with a Canon 50D with a standard profile and converted using DPP to jpeg creating files 638 x 425 pixels.

First up image taken with auto white balance:



Second, same image but white balance set in DPP with the white picker on the grey card seen in the image:



Third, custom white balance using the Seculine Vivicap:



Fourth, custom white balance using a piece of white toilet paper:



White balance can be very subjective and you may prefer cooler images to warmer images etc.

My Opinion

The auto white balance image looks a little cold to me. Using the grey card to set white balance looks good and so does the image using the Vivacap which looks a little bit warmer. The image using the toilet paper again looks a little cool.

I do not have an Expodisc to do a comparison with but I suspect there wouldn't be any great improvement in white balance. I have heard of photographers using the old plastic caps from Pringle crisps to set their white balance. I will now be using the Vivacap when taking shots in the future to save time post process.

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