Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/07/14

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Subject: Re: R8 metering (was: incident metering)
From: Pascal <cyberdog@ibm.net>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 17:10:27 +0200

At 23:05 -0400 13-07-1997, ted grant wrote:

>I can understand the single person against an all dark back ground and burning
>out the person due to the longer exposure to compensate for the treed
>background, howver the meter as perfect as it is, is still a tool and is
>only as
>good as the tool handler.
>
>I wouldn't have thought to shoot the way he did of the human being in his
>description, as I would have spot metered for the face and let everything fall
>where it may in relation to the face exposure.
>
>Then of course to have bracketed a few frames. Particularly with slide
>film. :)
>
>ted

Your point is taken. But then again, the Leica technicians at the Belgian
distributing office had assured me that the matrix-metering was almost 99%
foolproof (whatever that might be!). So, you could reasonably expect the
camera to expose this scene correctly.
I am not suggesting that others (like Nikon F5 3D-matrix with color meter)
are better. I just wanted to point out that the matrix-metering, however
awesome it may be in everyday photography, has its limits in contrast to
some marketing speak.
If you have to think for every scene if you will use spot metering or not,
you in fact loose the advantage of the no-nonsense approach that matrix
metering is offering. You might as well get back to the R7's metering
systems (spot and center-weighted only, but with memory lock in both cases
- - there is only memory lock for the R8's spot metering).

Just some more critical remarks from an otherwise very satisfied user :-)

Pascal

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