Canon 1N Evaluative Metering

[William Markey]

I just purchased a mint 1N - have not had a chance to shoot with it yet. I normally shoot strictly on manual with my other cameras (use an incident meter). Since the 1N is/was a "pro" camera, how is the evaluative metering? Can I trust it or is it kinda blah like the evaluative meters in many non-pro cameras? It would be nice to be able to trust the metering and not have to hand-meter everything. Thanks in advance for your comments.

PS - and yes, I know about the spot metering and such...I'm talking specifically about using the evaluative or AV/TV metering modes.

 

[FilmOnly]

I could not agree more: it would be nice to not have to bring my hand-held light meter everywhere. What a pleasure it would be to have an "unfoolable" meter. Some say the F6 has an infallible meter; others claim likewise for the F5. I tend to doubt that any in-camera meter is that good...however, I cannot rule it out because I have never used an F5, F6, 1n, 1v, etc. meter. I have heard that the 1n's meter is good (i.e. an improvement over a CW system), but that the 1v's meter is better yet. This may be of some help:

http://photonotes.org/reviews/1-1N-3-1V/

 

[jphendren]

While I have no experience with the 1N, I can say without reservation that the F5's meter is definitely better than the 1V's IMHO. I'd imagine it depends on wether you are shooting print or slide film, but for slide film, the F5 tends to preserve the highlights better than the 1V. I've noticed that if there is a decent amount of shade in the scene the 1V will try and correctly expose the shady area, blowing out the highlights. Now I've never shot print film before, but I have read that with print film you should expose for the shade, and the highlights will take care of themselves. Not true with slide film, if you overexpose the highlights, the image is junk. I can say that I have never had an occasion to where the F5's meter overexposed a slide image, EVER. I would imagine that the 1N's meter would tend to be biased the same as the 1V's. The 1V has 21 segments in its matrix, how many does the 1N have?

Jared