Friday, January 02, 2009

Another Minolta Meter

Image taken in manual mode at 1/60 sec, f 2.8, ISO 3200

Back on October 27, 2008, I wrote about one of the only original items of photography equipment that I still use for my wedding work today... a Minolta Autometer IIIf light meter. It was having some problems recently but if I bumped it around, it would work.

Well, it appeared that I could not trust it any longer as the problem seemed to happen more often. So I decided I needed to finally replace it. I was lucky enough to find a fellow wedding photographer who was selling her used Minolta Autometer Vf meter because she rarely used it and so I snatched it up! Minolta is no longer in business, but these meters have been very accurate and have served well for years.

The new meter arrived today, just in time for my next wedding on January 4. After allowing it to warm up from being out in the cold from shipment, I gave it a quick test... works fine! I decided to pull out my old Minolta meter to see how close my old 1990 meter was to the new one. The accuracy was within 0.1 f stops of the new one! Amazing!

Now if the old meter wasn't having intermittent problems, I'd still rely on it. But it's now time to retire it. But I'm happy to report that yet another Minolta meter will take it's place. I wonder if this one will last 18 years as well?

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