I've owned both the Minolta and the Pentax. I sold the Minolta to buy the Pentax. For pure zone system work, I find the Pentax much easier to use. OTOH, the Minolta had a lot of features that aren't present on the Pentax. Since I didn't need them, they just got in the way and made life more complicated. But if I didn't use the zone system, I might have preferred the Minolta.
Brian Ellis
Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you do criticize them you'll be
a mile away and you'll have their shoes.
Doesn't Calumet sell modified Pentax(?) spotmeters for zone system work? What capability do these modified meters provide that the vanilla Pentax doesn't? I've seen the picture of the Pentax spotmeter w/ pasted on zone scale in the Ansel Adams book (The Negative), and it seemed just fine on it's own.
Glenn,
No one seemed to be aware or at least familiar with the Sekonic 778. I have been using this meter for several years and although it's not the most compact meter I really like it's capabilities.
One advantage for the zone system practitioner is its ability to place (using the memory feature) shadows, highlights and midtones.
It also allows you to set just how far from the midtones the shadows and highlight are. IE you can set your shadow and highlight value to be exactly the number of f/stops (in half stops) you want from your zone V reading.
In short it is one of the easiest meters to use with the zone system once you have mastered it. It is more complicated than some of the others, but then it offers single and multiple flash, cord and cordless and several other modes.
If you don't plan to use flash, I shoot a lot of studio as well as outdoor, then it might be overkill.
If you do use flash on occasion then check out the 778. It's worth the extra bucks if you need its capabilities.
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