Wide Field Camera 3
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Posted by Alan Uomoto on June 17, 1999 at 15:02:27:

the main things being to avoid the 5577 night sky line (not a problem 
for [HST]) and make the Balmer jump
a filter boundary.  Including the z band near 1 micron is also important
since that's where most of the new discoveries will be.  In all, this
made sense from the standpoint of finding faint galaxies to target for
redshifts but it turns out that for most stars there's a good UBVRI
transformation so the usefulness of the system ought to be comparable
to other wide filter sets.

The simplest and most important reason for using SDSS filters is that
there will soon be more stars photometered in that system than all
others combined.  An arrogant but practical truth.  A few years from now (WFC3
launch time?) much of the sky to 23rd magnitude will have photometry in
this system and most people will be able to query a database for their
favorite "bright" objects and do the usual broad band photometry things.
You want to avoid the wrath of WFC3 users who will think (and say) "What
were you thinking when you didn't install SDSS filters?"