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Thread: How to read "K" value of light???

  1. #11
    bob carnie's Avatar
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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    I have posted this before but what the hell.. I would be very interested in a handheld meter that can read LAB... not the paint chip device btw.

  2. #12
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    Anything can be had for a price, Bob. It's not the hardware but the software that's the issue. My wife used a small spectrophotometer in biotech that cost six
    million dollars. It was stored behind a true timed bank vault door. The software was so proprietary that noboby in the entire corporation was allowed access to
    the complete script. You should really get ahold of Joe Holmes in my neighborhood and try to get your heads together. Or maybe somebody like XRite is already
    onto this. But don't expect any machine to be a substitute for the human eye. These things just speed workflow and save eye fatigue, unless of course they're
    dealing in something molecular and otherwise invisible to human vision, like the expensive device I just described.

  3. #13
    bob carnie's Avatar
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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    Hey they built the six dollar man... they should be able to make a LAB meter for much less.

  4. #14
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    Yeah, when I started fooling with paint spectrophotometers they cost nearly a hundred grand and were about ten feet wide and eight feet tall. IBM made them.
    Now they're a couple thousand and a small as a darkroom densitometer. The funny thing is, the early ones were better because they plotted full spectrum and
    didn't just interpolate points. The truly portable ones using battery and not tethered to a serious power supply aren't good for much at all; and the cell phone apps are just a marketing ploy and otherwise relatively useless. I knew about them before the public ever did, and the real reason behind them. To push enough light into any deep hue and get a reflective reading you need a pretty powerful xenon flash burst. But none of them are even remotely a substitute for the human eye, particularly at the extremes either direction. They just save eye fatigue with the approximate early stages of matching. When our full-time matcher hits a bind he always looks me up for an actual visual opinion.

  5. #15

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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    Sekonic makes a color meter FYI (as in currently) since Minolta doesn't obviously.

    Nothing wrong with used, just thought I would mention it.

  6. #16
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    Gosh, Stone, I thought you had more class than that! Evvvverybody knows the ONLY color meter that ever existed is the Minolta. They can still be had. But no,
    I'm not selling mine.

  7. #17

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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
    ... Evvvverybody knows the ONLY color meter that ever existed is the Minolta...
    'Houston, we have a problem'.

    http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search...159+4291226600

  8. #18
    Kirk Gittings's Avatar
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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    I have a Minolta Color Meter III I've been meaning to sell for awhile......
    Thanks,
    Kirk

    at age 73:
    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep"

  9. #19

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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
    Gosh, Stone, I thought you had more class than that! Evvvverybody knows the ONLY color meter that ever existed is the Minolta. They can still be had. But no,
    I'm not selling mine.
    Yea yea.

    I was on set with the DP on ... I think it was "Unfinished Business" ... But I worked on a lot of sets with a lot of DP's so it's sort of a blur, but anyone some talented and successful DP that had used his Minolta for years was trying out the new Sekonic light meter and color meter and said it seemed to do the job accurately and the only reason he wasn't switching was because his wasn't dead yet, but he wasn't worried about if it died and he had to switch.

    So I took that as a sign not to worry. Sekonic's are very good also, I would have gotten an older Minolta if my pocket wizards worked with them like my Sekonic does. I've been considering finding a smaller spot/incident meter than the Sekonic 7xxDR (x's are numbers I can't remember but there's only one 700 series that I know of anyway) as its bulky and heavy but I don't think they make a dual meter that smaller with a spot that also goes lower in light reading. I could be wrong there's a lot out there. I know there's a spot that goes much lower in light trading I just don't think it also has an incident meter AND is smaller. But again, I'm open to being corrected, then I'll go buy one!

  10. #20
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: How to read "K" value of light???

    "Houston we have a problem. My super-expensive new Sekonic meter even tells me the correct Wratten filter to use, and now you're telling me that I can't get
    those anymore even down there on earth?" Thanks. But I'm happy with my Minolta and my set of REAL Wrattens, many of which went out of manufacture long
    ago. Good luck with those phony poly gels cut out from half-melted soda bottles.

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