Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/06/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Doug Cooper jotted down the following: > The OM4ti is an interesting body. I have mixed feelings about it. The > metering system is the most intelligent devised by man (although I never > understood the point of averaging multiple spot readings) -- if you're > even slightly inclined towards Zone rigor, the OM4ti makes that system > ludicrously easy to work with. These days I tend to prefer incident > metering, but I miss the shadow and hi-lite buttons on the Olympus. Personally, I thought Olympus got it all wrong. They had a wonderful idea and then screwed it up in the implementation. The highlight and shadow buttons on the OM4 (and OM3?) add or subtract a fixed amount (something like +2.5 and -2.0 EV) from the reading to compensate for highlights or shadows. Now, Canon, on the other hand, got it right in their T90. Now *there* is the ultimate in-camera light-metering system as far as I'm concerned. Spot, partial, and centre-weighted (all that was missing was matrix). They also had highlight/shadow buttons, but their implementation was much smarter: press the shadow button once, and the reading was adjusted -0.5 EV. Press it again, another -0.5 EV adjustment, and so on. The highlight button adjusted upwards in increments of 0.5 EV I believe. This puts control in the the hands of the photographer who is at the scene and knows what the camera meter is being pointed at, rather than in the hands of the designer who has no clue about this. For quick yet fine control of exposure, I cannot imagine a system other than this spot-meter-and-nudge that can beat it. M. - -- Martin Howard | iCon iDole iRate Visiting Scholar, CSEL, OSU | iDeal iDull iMage email: howard.390@osu.edu | iSue iOn iGnorance www: http://mvhoward.i.am/ +---------------------------------------