If the water contains tannin, no particulate filter will remove it. Tannin, as well as most colors and odors, will be dissolved in the water. Some or most of this may be removed with a carbon filter and some or most of this may be removed by treatment with an oxidizer (bleach, chlorine dioxide, hydrogen peroxide, etc.). If there are suspended solids in the water, I would suggest a prefilter. My standard is the pleated paper coffee filter because they are cheap and widely available. You can hang your raw water from a tree and use a siphon tube with a coffee filter wrapped around the end of the tube and held on with a rubber band or string. It's not hard to improvise something. I use a single cup silicone coffee brewing funnel with muslin filters that I made. Paper cone filters can be used, but not reused. pleated paper filters can be reused, but not much. If you intend to chemically treat the water or use a carbon filter, it is best to use a prefilter. The suspended solids may use up some of the chemicals. Another good way to remove suspended solids if you have a bucket and the time is to add alum to the water. It only takes a little, but the alum coagulates the solids and helps to settle them. You then decant the water from the bucket and throw away the sediment. Alum, or ferric chloride, is very commonly used in the first stages of municipal water treatment to settle the solids. See Cliff Jacobsen's books for more on alum. If you want to use activated carbon, there are a number of options. You can use granulated activated charcoal in a coffee filter. The granules can be reused until they lose their effectiveness and then regenerated in an oven. A cartridge filter can be used inline with a particulate filter. If you rig a gravity filter setup, like Sawyer's, you can add a carbon filter after the particulate filter. I would look for one like is used on ice makers. They are often used as post filters on reverse osmosis purifiers.