High quality light meter
Written: Jun 04 '06
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Compact, simple to use, sensitive, uses ubiquitous AAA batteries
Cons: No longer being made
The Bottom Line: A great meter, sensitive and easy to use, if you can find one.
|
|
|
| majid's Full Review: Gossen Luna-pro Digital F #4023 |
Note: this light meter is known as the Sixtomat Flash in Europe, and the user manual can be downloaded at:
http://www.gossen-photo.de/pdf/ba_sixtoflash_gb.pdf
The Gossen Luna-Pro digital F is a compact incident and reflected lightmeter and flashmeter. Lightmeters are typically used by medium and large-format photographers, or users of classic cameras that do not have a built-in meter.
I bought it as an upgrade from a Gossen Digisix. The Digisix is compact, but it has too many functions crammed into too few buttons, yielding a confusing user interface, and it uses button batteries which have a tendency to fail you when you least need it. The Luna-Pro Digital F uses one bog-standard AAA available nearly anywhere, and it has a much cleaner user interface without unnecessary bells and whistles like a thermometer or a timer.
You can easily switch between modes with two dedicated cursor keys, between EV read-out, aperture-priority or shutter-priority modes, and scan through the various possible aperture/shutter combinations using another pair of cursor keys. There is an analog scale at the bottom of the display, graduated from f/1 to f/90, showing the recommended exposure, or if you hold the measurement button and scan the meter over the scene, it will show the subject's contrast range, useful if you are a follower of the zone system. Switching between incident and reflective modes is done by sliding a lumisphere on or off the silicon photodiode cell.
Reflective light meters (including those built into modern cameras) measure reflected light from the scene, and despite advances in multi-segment evaluative ("matrix") metering, they can be fooled into under- or over-exposing if the scene is unusually bright or unusually dark. A white dog sitting in snow would be underexposed, for instance, because the light meter expects a scene with "average" reflectance, which is not the case.
Measuring the light falling onto the scene with an incident light meter means you can set the correct exposure for the light actually hitting the scene, independently of the reflectivity of items in the scene. This is why incident meters are used when geting the exposure right the first time really matters, such as when shooting movie scenes with expensive motion-picture film (this meter actually has a "Cine" mode for cinematographers). Thus, even people using modern DSLRs with all the bells and whistles could benefit from using a good incident meter like this one.
The flash meter function works in much the same way for studio photography, by connecting the meter to the flashes using a PC sync cord, or even without in triggered slave mode. As I don't do flash photography, I won't comment further, but studio photographers will not be disappointed in this unit (unless they want PocketWizard wireless trigger compatibility, in which case a Sekonic flashmeter with the optional Wizard receiver module might be more appropriate).
The Luna-Pro digital F bears the name of the legendary analog Luna-Pro meter, still made today, and named after its ability to meter in moonlight. The Luna-Pro is featured in Ansel Adams' "The Camera" and the digital is shown in his authorized "Basic techniques of photography". The digital version holds to that pedigree, being able to meter up to EV -2.5 (i.e. a scene that requires 6 minutes' exposure at at f/8 !) , and thus great for long-exposure night photography.
The only thing this meter does not have is spot metering capabilities. You can get combination meters like the Gossen Starlite or those from Sekonic, but they are bulky and so packed with features as to become very difficult to use, and often their "spot" does not have a true 1 degree narrow measurement range. I prefer my combo of a simple meter like the Luna-Pro Digital F (or the Digisix) and a good dedicated spotmeter like the Pentax Digital Spot meter (another Ansel Adams favorite known for its ergonomics).
The Luna-Pro Digital meters (F or not F) are no longer manufactured, and have been superseded by the Gossen Digipro F, which has essentially the same features, but adds a swivelling sensor head. I opted for the older model from "old new" stock because I have concerns about how robust the newer model's swivelling head will prove in use.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
majid
|
|
Member: Fazal Majid
Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
I'm the CTO of an Internet startup
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.