OK...here goes...I'll risk it!
When I started out to do LF 4x5 photography the first thing I bought was a used Soligor SpotSensorII...my exposures have always been good when using it. I also tried it for a while for still life photography but found that it was not really the right tool for this and I acquired another vintage lightmeter with both incident (white bulb) and reflective measurements. When used as incident reader the exposures are very accurate (proof point being chromes with excellent light and colors) but as reflective reader it does not provide me with the 'same' values as my spotsensor and when placing the measurements accordingly into Zones it did not match the incident reading. So I bought another vintage lightmeter hoping this would provide me better accuracy also for reflective readings, but this one turned out to be the opposite of the first one, actually is quite useful for use when the spotsensor would be to tedious to use but useless for incident readings. To help a friend I got a third one and this one is off in all aspects. And to make it worse, the lightmeters are also showing different variations depending on if it is a dark setting or a very bright one. All of them are CDS readers requiring batteries (...and I have checked the batteries are fresh)
To make the story short - the more meters I have the more uncertain I get. Almost to the point that I nolonger trust my original spotsensor...and wonder how I could get a successful exposure in the first place.
Now to the question: Do you experience that your lightmeters show these types of variations among themselves and for incident vs. reflective readings? And what do you do about it, i.e. how do you determine which is accurate and which is not. Does new meters show the same patterns? Thanks, Patrik