I work in outdoor/sports lighting distribution and am starting to do more work for my pop's engineering outfit.

We typically ran a Gossen Meter, but I wanted a one that i could run one handed that could double duty in my photography things. We picked up a the Sekonic L-478DR-U that arrived today. So far, I'm pretty pumped on it. Seems fairly easy to use and rather intuitive. The Gossen needs to be sent off and be recalibrated anyways, so I said why not. Anyone dabble with this unit here and there? What are y'alls thoughts?

I will be comparing them side by side tonight on a final inspection. I was surprised they had a footcandle mode, I'm just hoping it's accurate. The only thing I'm curious on is, how often or if I can, send it in to be recalibrated in the footcandle aspect.

Sekonic by Chris Weathers, on Flickr

No experience with that model, but I've had a Sekonic L-358 for quite a few years now, and I like it a lot.  I don't use it often, but it is a nice item to have, especially when working with strobes.  Being able to trigger the strobes (via Pocket Wizards) and take a meter reading at the same time is very convenient.

Don't know anything about having  to recalibrate it on occasion, but mine has always been accurate.

I always ran Gossen Lunapro F to ballance studio lights but that was when we shot real film.

We've been running the Mavolux. But we were testing the Sekonic in the office to see if it's near what we assume is right, Sekonic was reading out about what we thought and the Gossen was way off(I did mention in OP that it needs recalibrating). But on location it still seems kind of on point.

Mavolux


If this Sekonic does well tonight, we'll be picking up another one. It wont have any transceiver compatibility though, I ordered the PW one on purpose.

I use a Minolta.

... Ya know, never really considered the issue of drift through the life of the sensor. Hm.

My pics always turn out pretty, though! Lol

Right. I'm usually good about getting pretty dang close, but I wanted a new toy to play with.

I need to break down and buy one eventually.

In my previous life I sold Pentax Spotmeters,  Gossen, Minolta and Sekonic meters.

We would use either MacBeth Color Checkers or Kodak 18% Gray Cards in a standard lighting set. Sp we could do test in the showroom and studio for accuracy, repeatability and comparison. SO MANY VARIABLES!

In general it was a toss up between Minolta and Sekonic, just came down to features you would use. Older Gossen meters were the standard for incident low light metering. A Zone V Pentax Spotmeter was pretty much the standard for reflective ambient light metering. If you could read reflective variations of different colors.

Sekonic’s are GTG just learn how to get the most  from it and you’ll be happy.

I put them both up against each other(again, the gossen needs recalibrating) but the Sekonic was spot on with our Musco photometric plans, which actually kind of surprised me. It was so convenient compared to the Gossen, that we are foregoing recalibration and we ordered a 2nd Sekonic.

Now, for a chance to play with it for photo related things. I'm pretty excited about it.

I bought the L-758DR-U DigitalMaster.
I love the spot meter when using my RB67