Camera with 16 spot lightmeter - Is it based zone system ?

My friend bought an second hand minolta - like an lego spaceship - with 16 spot lightmeter. How does 16 spot lightmeter compare with zone system , expose for shadows and develop for highlights. I saw some gallery images from these techno cameras and I thought there were no shadow details and images are flat. May be they were old scans.

Do you have a specific model name of the Minolta?...a '16 spot lightmeter' does not invoke a speicifi model.
There are few cameras that permitted one to bias individual readings identified as 'shadow' vs 'highlight' readings, and Minolta is not one of them that comes to mind.

Do you mean a camera which allows you to average several spot meter readings? The Canon T90 has such a feature. I find it a bit slow to use most of the time, so I do a single spot and just try to find where I want my middle grey to be while half-pressing for the exposure lock. I'll use my sense of the sunny 16 rules to determine if my spot reading seems too low or high and pick a new one in that case. If there's no middle grey I can spot meter, sometimes I will purposely meter on the edge of two different brightness zones to get the middle value.

Any relation to the Zone System would be coincidental. Zones are typically thought of as spaced one f-stop apart. And that is how quantitative light meters read, so you can simply count from the center point how many EV increments are involved to equate to Zones, plus or minus. Most Zonie enthusiasts factor 8 Zones of dynamic range; but that's not a fixed rule.

The handheld Minolta Spotmeter F did allow one to punch in highlight as well as shadow readings. The visual dial on the Pentax Digital spotmeter makes such comparisons highly intuitive at a glance. Internal TTL camera "spot" functions can be a chore by comparison. The more "airplane cockpit" the experience is, the more distracting and inefficient, at least to me. Simpler is better.

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:

How does 16 spot lightmeter compare with zone system , expose for shadows and develop for highlights.

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There have been cameras, some later minoltas included, with a multiple spot metering system (the T90 mentioned by @loccdor is another well-known one). These metering systems work by storing several spot measurements for a single scene, so the photographer can then balance the final exposure to account for all measurements. It can be helpful to figure out what the scene-brightness range is and where the best compromise for exposure may be found.

The zone system is an elaborate system that encompasses metering of the scene and film development. It relies to a large extent on the use of a spot meter. In doing so, it doesn't really matter whether the photographer uses their human memory to memorize different meter readings, or the camera stores them in temporary memory. The zone system arguably works best with situations where each individual image can be developed separately to account for 'plus' and 'minus' development. So it's inherently less suitable for small format cameras that take roll film. Also, arguably, the zone system is sort of been taken over by the advent of variable contrast papers which allow for considerable flexibility in printing, regardless of the contrast range of the negatives (within reasonable limites).

'Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights' is a general principle that applies to B&W negative film and isn't really tied to the zone system and it only loosely relates to the use of spot meters.

There are relationships between these constructs, but they're complex and indirect.

A fantastic tool, which a multi-spot equipped camera can be, is of course no guarantee in any way for good photographs. Conversely, a competent photographer may produce excellent results even with sub-optimal tools. Furthermore, a photographer may have a keen eye for composition etc, but may have mediocre skills in bringing that work to display (print/digital). So if the resulting images you saw are lackluster, this can be due to pretty much anything and the multi-spot function of the camera likely has very little to do with it either way.

koraks said:

These metering systems work by storing several spot measurements for a single scene, so the photographer can then balance the final exposure to account for all measurements.

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Hello Koraks, Can you please teach me how to use multi spot lightmeter to see the darkest and lightest areas and how many stops between them in single half click of the shutter ? Does camera writes every measurement on display ? I can imagine all of those works on digital camera but cant imagine for analog.

And does this multispot lightmeter work on manual mode ?

Or does all of this gizmo is for shoot and forget ?

Or let me not make you tired , let me learn the model number and read the manual. This is the best way.

Yes the manual will tell you. In the T90 it shows you each spotmeter reading on a display that looks like a ruler next to the viewfinder image.

loccdor said:

Yes the manual will tell you. In the T90 it shows you each spotmeter reading on a display that looks like a ruler next to the viewfinder image.

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Thank you very much , this is so exciting , I swear camera owner would never imagine that , we spoke for hours but never told me such a thing He will be suprised.

I don't see the usefulness of multi-spot metering. It was not intended for black & white zone system use. If you want the most effective use of the zone system, you should use sheet film. Multi-spot metering was meant to optimize the exposures when shooting color slide film. The early multi-pattern metering systems were in the Nikon FA and Olympus OM PC. Later systems would become more sophisticated but these two showed the way. Unless you are going to make multiple fractional exposures with special neutral density filters, no matter how many spot readings you take, you can only make one exposure setting. You could bracket your exposures but that's pretty expensive today. Color print film is more forgiving and costs less.

dynachrome said:

I don't see the usefulness of multi-spot metering. It was not intended for black & white zone system use. If you want the most effective use of the zone system, you should use sheet film. Multi-spot metering was meant to optimize the exposures when shooting color slide film. The early multi-pattern metering systems were in the Nikon FA and Olympus OM PC. Later systems would become more sophisticated but these two showed the way. Unless you are going to make multiple fractional exposures with special neutral density filters, no matter how many spot readings you take, you can only make one exposure setting. You could bracket your exposures but that's pretty expensive today. Color print film is more forgiving and costs less.

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I want to ask that each one of the reading of spots , classify as spot meters and is it possible to use incident meter on these cameras ? Another question , I have two friends with entry level minoltas with multimeters, which button activate to display 16 readings ?

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:

I want to ask that each one of the reading of spots , classify as spot meters and is it possible to use incident meter on these cameras ? Another question , I have two friends with entry level minoltas with multimeters, which button activate to display 16 readings ?

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You can get specific manuals for any cameras your friends have free if you do a search of the internet, or just go here https://www.butkus.org/chinon/

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:

Hello Koraks, Can you please teach me how to use multi spot lightmeter to see the darkest and lightest areas and how many stops between them in single half click of the shutter ? Does camera writes every measurement on display ? I can imagine all of those works on digital camera but cant imagine for analog.

And does this multispot lightmeter work on manual mode ?

Or does all of this gizmo is for shoot and forget ?

Or let me not make you tired , let me learn the model number and read the manual. This is the best way.

Click to expand...

'Single click' - I don't know about that. I'm familiar with how the function works on the T90, which is a camera I own and regularly use. You can take several spot meter readings, one after another, and they appear on a bar that shows the difference in stops between all readings. It's very convenient I think. It's an inherently manual metering mode because you successively select spots and then meter them one by one, and once you're happy with the set, you adjust the exposure so that the range of metered spots falls where you want it. It's also the polar opposite of 'shoot and forget'; it's the most deliberate and controlled way of using an in-camera meter that I know of.

Nothing in this process is inherently analog or digital, although I've never seen this feature on a digital camera (which doesn't say much; there are so many camera models out there after all). I think the added value for digital would be less because people will just generally snap a pic, look at the screen and/or the histogram and see if they like the result, and re-take it if they're not happy. In a way, the histogram on a digital camera can be considered as having rendered multi-spot redundant. Likewise, modern matrix metering can also be argued to have superseded this, and in reality it actually has, since matrix metering takes into account the distribution of light intensity across the entire image frame and automatically determines proper exposure on this basis. What this does not do, at least not in cameras I'm familiar with, is plot the difference intensities on a bar/scale before the exposure is made.

For the Minolta camera I can only refer you to the manual as I've not used this feature on a Minolta camera. I expect it works similarly as on the Canon T90 however.

A past discussion of multispot metering on cameras with that feature:

Generally, the big difference is that with in-camera multi-spot metering, the camera is making the exposure decisions for you based on some approximated statistical program, scattergun-approach, while with a true spotmeter, you're selecting your own select points to target, read, and compare, and therefore making the decisions for yourself, sniper approach.