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New light meter / color meter...

Ai Print

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About 18 months ago, I backed a project on Kickstarter for a new type of light meter that also has a color meter in it among other useful things. While it very easily already takes care of my photo needs, it is also feature rich enough for most digital cine work and is slated to take on even more features. I got my Lit Duo 1 about a month ago and already it is standout meter among my 6 other meters of various types. If you have ever priced a color meter, it is usually over $1,000 for that feature alone, is very large and pretty delicate. In my commercial work, having a color meter is almost compulsory for me these days, mixed lighting can be a bear to deal with in the digital realm, even when shooting raw so this is a bit overdue for me.

Lit systems really took a lot of time to design the Duo 1, it is a tank but small. It is also well thought out in terms of interface. One really cool feature is if you use AA NiMH batteries, they can be charged in the meter via a USB-C outlet. They last forever as it is but this truly makes sense from standpoint of always having an option to power it. Another cool feature is the app and ease of FW updates. It does not have a spot mode and the dome does not retract but it kind of does not need to and is really robust because of this.

I'm quite happy with this meter. I take it out even when shooting film because like learning light with an ambient meter, I am learning to see color casts and mixtures by taking a reading or two whether I need to or not.

Anyway, this is one heck of a great meter and I am happy I backed the project and now have it in my hand.

 
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mshchem said:
How much $$$?

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Hard to tell as they seem to only start retailing it next month, but from the Kickstarter I can surmise that the official retail price would be $729 for the "C1" product and $849 for the 'DUO 1'.
It looks really nice, it has to be said! Personally, for that kind of money I'd want a spot meter and could do without the colorimeter functionality, but I'm clearly not the audience this product is aimed at. The marketing pics suggest it's aimed mostly/also at video production.
 

Nice to see new interest in this sort of thing. I have plenty of meters.
 
They decided to just offer the Duo 1 which makes a lot more sense from the aspect of upgradability with the existing hardware. I think my second to earliest backer price was about $600 but tariffs pushed it up another $112 from there as it will on the final retail price.

Totally agree on the aiming at an audience, so if they do great with this one, that next-level spot meter could possibly follow.
 
I am curious about the intended target user, too. In the past, the photographer or cinematographer might want to know color temp in rather simple fashion, to know if to pull out daylight- vs tungsten- balanced emulsion. Shooting under fluorescent light was a bit of a crapshoot because one could put on filtration to make better the balance, but it was a crapshoot simply because one never knew the right filtration values for the tubes -- the tubes generally fell into one of three deficiencies -- in use at the site (and usually there were a mix of tubes with different balance point actually in use.

Now, to a greater extent, we have sources that are deficient at many different points across the spectrum, deviating from 'daylight' in many different ways, and even a mixture of light sources to contend with...
... So what do you do about this, as a professional?! How do you correct for the multifude of deficiencies? It is nowhere as simple as 'pick tungsten film' or 'throw this filter on the lens'!

Just musing out loud, with hopes someone might have some insight into "Who uses a meter with a full color spectrum bar display, and how might they address metered deficiencies in that spectrum at that location"?
...other than the time honored solution of photographers and cinematographers..."Simple, just overpower existing light with lots of supplement light of suitable color balance"???

[edit] Looking at the photo again, I see it shows measured color temp and suggested correction...I hate to think of the variety of correction filters that someone would need to carry, for an instantaneous fix.
 
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wiltw said:
So what do you do about this, as a professional?!
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Depends.
In cases of no/poor control, color grading in post, using curves. For more repetitive lighting conditions, build LUTs tailored to that light.
In cases of good control over lighting, use cinematic lighting. LED isn't as abysmal as you suggest it is. It has a distinct profile to it which, given reasonably good CRI, is not as peaky or lumpy as it's sometimes made out to be. Keep in mind that the response of the sensor (and previously, film) also never was perfectly linear across the spectrum. There were always idiosyncrasies to light/sensor interactions.
The main thing that has changed is that the options to control the final outcome are vastly more expansive and flexible to use. What you seem to experience as a problem, is in fact the opposite. But the situation is different from 40 years ago, and that makes it confusing for those who are mostly familiar with the technology of that era.
 

Pretty much my experience too. During Covid, I took on some video / motion work and dealt with a bit of this and still do shoot some B-roll using my Mavic 4 drones. But for the most part, I sold all the gimbals and hot lights off to return to what I want to do which is stills only.

I will readily admit that with tools like custom white balance in-camera, I don’t necessarily *need* a spectrometer as much as I used to but there are a few regular client’s venues in particular that are troublesome, especially when they don’t control the mixed lighting aspect of these places and I am dealing with skin tones. I am really digging getting the reading though and punching that number in to very good effect.

Like I said earlier, I love getting a reading and then having it inform in somewhat algorithmic fashion my mental map of seeing color casts, they are often much more pronounced in K numbers than my eyes perceive. If I were a lighting designer dealing with customers like galleries, I would absolutely want to have a tool like this at my disposal.
 
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Thx for the elaboration.
Actually I had done testing myself back 15+ years ago, at color reproduction in the dSLR using lighting provided by LED of different CRI (unfortunately cannot find notes nor examples from that testing). And in spite of using 'good CRI' vs 'bad CRI' sources, I did not discern a lot of difference between the two. In fact, that testing also included my previouly posted examples of differences in color rendering simply involving changes in sources of different color temperature!
BTW, I did not consider the issue to be a 'problem'...in spite of the fact that fluorscents could have several different solutions (depending upon bulbs in use), correction was not all that critical that folks would notice...Practically speaking, not really a problem at all! (40 years ago, I never had to employ tailored filtration for fluorescent, even though I had the awareness of the differences.) More of a 'challenge' to handle and neutralize for the really picky client, but not so much a 'problem'.
I can understand 'more solutions today', but if no one noticed 40 years ago, would they notice today?! It seems, particularly made more so with the popularity of the sins of the cellphone camera, that folks are LESS critical or demanding of the photography, than they were 40 years ago. Flat light criticized, with 'sculpted' lighting preferred...NOT.
 
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wiltw said:
And in spite of using 'good CRI' vs 'bad CRI' sources, I did not discern a lot of difference between the two.
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It'll likely depend on the interaction between the sensor and the light source. I can see how the differences might be minimal if the recording system de-emphasizes the region around 475nm where the LEDs spectrum will generally dip. Also, keep in mind that 15 years ago, high CRI in LEDs was uncommon and to an extent even categorically unavailable. CRI95 became more accessible some 8 years or so ago. CRI is of course a bit of a haphazard proxy to begin with, but it at least gives a bit of an indication.
To the naked eye the differences can be huge if you know what to look for, and like many things, it cannot be 'unseen' once you notice it.

Ai Print said:
If I were a lighting designer dealing with customers like galleries, I would absolutely want to have a tool like this at my disposal.
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Yeah, although I'd probably want to use a proper photospectrometer if at all possible. I understand the meter proposed here is something halfway a high-res photospectrometer and a color temperature meter. I suppose it leverages the common availability right now of e.g. AMS sensors that offer separate readout across a number of channels/wavelength bins. Really nice stuff, the size of a grain of rice!
 

Thanks, certainly a good option. I am very happy with my DUO-1 meter which I use quite a bit now, have an interior editorial shoot for Vanity Fair coming up this weekend which will involve a fair amount of mixed lighting so I am glad to have the meter in the kit.

By chance, did you read my PM I sent a couple days ago?
 
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