Finally...

My K20D consistently underexposes. It is worse with some lenses than others. It took a while to get used to it, especially after the Ds which never had a problem. I really thought my photography had gone to pot. It's one of the (minor) reasons I was/am unhappy with the K20D.
Put a CPL on it and it is terrible. It takes a few test shots to get anything like a good exposure.
Thank heavens for RAW .

Roll on Photokina.

We're all still learning (hopefully) Flossie!

If you think you might be losing that spontaneous shot, you could try exosure bracketing, and customise it so that at least one of the bracketed series is well under-exposed. Check out pp 109 - 111 of the Kx manual if you want to pursue it.

If you want to rattle the whole bracket off quickly, use this in combination with continuous shooting mode (p. 136). It does tend to chew through SD cards though.

And apologies Andrew for the parrot on the shoulder, arrhh - your thread has been pirated!

Do you've the metering problem with all the metering modes?

Only in the beginning I've had the camera on Matrix but now a days it's almost constantly on Average or Spot metering.

I nearly always permanently set -2/3 of a stop compensation on my Pentax KX. I do alter this in some circumstances, after viewing the preview.

With my Canon 5D and 40D I always also set -2/3 of a stop compensation. So switching brands dos not address the issue.

We must fine tune our cameras to get the best results. If we have a television that has an overbright picture, we dial in compensation. So it should be with a camera.

I have the "least bad" results with Matrix, I did try Spot & Centre-Weighted for a while but too many overexposed faces - with no target in the Kx viewfinder the "focus&recompose" method to get exposure is too hit'n'miss.

I think I just need to get in the habit of -2/3 EV more often as people have said - I don't have any problem with lifting dark images in Lightroom later as always shoot RAW so there's PP involved to make the pics look good anyway...

If you change the settings to AF-S and Centre weighted metering you should have no problems.

Do give it a try and let us know how it works out.

My experiences with my K-m:

Using modern autofocus lenses the exposure is perfect, although I do have trouble with strongly backlit subjects such as aircraft or landscapes with a bright sky. This isn't a fault of the camera.

Using older K mount lenses it's pretty much on the money using stop down metering until you get down to f11 or so, smaller apertures than this cause problems

Using M42 lenses with an official adapter, forget it! The results are always horribly underexposed no matter what settings I use, and for the hassle I'd rather just buy K lenses (the original 1975-77 series being SMC Takumars with K mounts, so same quality but a lot simpler to use).

Do you not find that the sky tends to burn out more with centre-weighted metering?

Sure it gives you a better shot at whatever's in the middle of the frame, but I've found that if there's a bright sky behind, I end up with cyan bands as the colours start to clip.

It's ruined a lot of photos that were otherwise Ok. This is an example of the sort of thing I mean - it's not terribly offensive in this one (I have a lot worse), but the cyan between the blue that's exposed Ok, to the completely burned out white, is quite unpleasant.

Not sure there's an answer really.

No, quite the opposite really. Metering is metering, no more, no less, but Matrix metering is doing something Unknown when it calculates whatever it calculates, according to its algorithms.

No metering can be taken at face value, which is why I have set the front wheel on my K20D to exposure compensation.

However, at least with centre weighted and spot metering we are just getting a reading and we know what it means. Therefore, we can apply our practice to the situation and compensate accordingly. With digital this can also easily be checked and immediately corrected if necessary.

With centre weighted metering, such as we have in the ME Super and MX cameras, I never, ever got over-exposed slides. Bright skies could fool the camera into under-exposing if uncorrected, but that's better than burnt out skies.

I'm surprised to hear this. I only ever took one slide film so I'm not at all qualified to comment. I guess centre-weighted must still give a good percentage of its calculation to the background in those camera.

If a central subject is bright enough, then it won't be a problem, but my experience is that with the K10D it's very easy to burn out the sky using C-W (and even more so with spot) to attempt to expose for a darker centre. It's no good having a beautifully exposed subject if the background is vile.

A lot easier than film, certainly.

But not if the subject is moving, so that you only get one go.

It may be largely down to technique.

To take the moving subject, is it necessary to meter for every shot? The overall light in an area may be similar for quite a while and once set, manual exposure could be very satisfactory.

I'm thinking here of situations like say a race circuit. You meter, you manually focus on a spot and when the racing car arrives just before that spot you press the shutter release. No need for fast AF or auto metering, much of the time anyway.

I wonder if sometimes all the auto functions actually get in the way rather than helping.

In that situation, yes, I expect it would be fine to do it that way.

The only action photography I have any experience of is aircraft, and it it would be hopeless! The light can be so different in different parts of the sky that manual techniques (especially focusing, as I mentioned elsewhere) are tricky to say the least.

I've heard metering off the grass and sticking with that as a technique, but I haven't really tried it. I probably should.

However film, by its nature, deals with over-exposure very gracefully. Digital does not!

I'd love to have a needle-meter like we used to have years ago, it was clear, intuitive and easy to use. I don't ever recall over or underexposing shots on film, either!

The info in the viewfinder on the Kx is overloaded with excessive information that I don't need to have continously in my eyeline (e.g. ISO), yet its too dim to actually read it anyway...! and not just outside - I'm in a dark room at work atm and can barely read that info... and that's even if I haven't accidentally knocked the diopter oof(again).

I managed to take a bunch of shots with the 50/1.7 recently that were completely overexposed : was at iso-400 and F2 and hit the maximum shutter speed of 1/6000 when the sun suddenly came out - ok, that was my fault, but if the display had been warning me I simply couldn't see it in the viewfinder! OK maybe it was, but it was too dim and I was concerned with composition & focus and trying to capture the right moment, it needs to be far more obvious that there's a problem! I said a while back how much clearer I found the viewfinder on a D90, let alone FF cameras...

Slide fim does not either, hence my recommendation that everyone should shoot at least one slide film in their lives, just to see how good their exposure technique and compositional skills really are.

Glad you admit it! But seriously, in daylight those are strange settings to be using, whatever were you photographing?