[font color=\'#000000\']Hmmm. Allow me to be the lone dissenter.
Some years back I bought several Singh-Ray ("Galen Rowell") ND grads. Serious money (well, for pieces of flat plastic). Tried them for some time. Don't use them anymore. Heck, I ought to sell them.
For one, the ND grad is now becoming a cliche. It's easy to spot a lot of the time. The didymium filter of the year.
For another, they're fiddly as heck to use. Tripod use pretty much required.
For another, they often just don't "work" right. Unless you're just doing prairie landscapes or seascapes (what I mostly bought them for), you're probably going to end up filtering some object in your scene that you'd just as soon not. It looks funny.
But the final thing, for me, was moving to the digital darkroom. I use color neg film and take two scans of the same neg, or transparency film and take two tripod shots at different exposures. These are combined using masks in the image editor. I can now get the result the ND grad is intended to get, only this way it really works, on exactly the portions of the image it needs to. No artifacts, and total control. I find this so far superior to what I was getting with ND grads that I've given them up.
If you're not using the digital darkroom then yeah, I can see ND grads. Still a PITA, but better than nothing. Other than that, pass. Just imo.[/font]