It always has and needs to be corrected manually each month. Unfortunately I was away this time and didn't notice that it hadn't been done, so it expired. Please remind me if it doesn't get done on the day of the competition being created.

As for now, I'll ask IT to put it right tomorrow (Tuesday) and we'll get under way again. So get your entries ready and it will be sorted soon.

You had taken 700 shots? Maybe the battery was depleted, just as the display said. What happened if you just put the spare battery in?

If you switch the camera on whilst holding down the menu button, the firmware version will be displayed. You can then check the Ricoh website to see if there is a later version. Your exact camera model will be listed.

You could read my EPZ/PU review, which covers what I thought of the K-S2. TIPA awards, EPZ Editor's Choice....plus a lot of very favourable comment across the web.

Buy with confidence, I'm sure you'll love it!

The emphasis of my comment was on current digital cameras. It may well be that earlier film cameras behaved differently, but at least the K-5 manual says centre weighted only. The answer is for individuals to check their manuals for their specific cameras.

For older lenses, centre weighted metering is used regardless of what is set on the camera. There is a sensitivity distribution graph shown in the manual.

Just to clarify, when I say that matrix metering is doing unknown things what I mean is that we don't know the detail of what it's programmed for. For example, if there's a bright sky over the top 20% of an image do we presume it's going to compensate for that and expose for the rest of the shot? Is it clever enough to think "landscape with bright sky"? And what if we wanted a silhouette? If it does compensate, then out desired end result could be out of the window.

In identical circumstances, I would expect such metering to be predictable though, which is a different thing.

Centre-weighted meter sees the whole frame, but puts more emphasis on the centre. This will suffice for almost all shots but it needs human intervention via the exposure compensation. A simplistic example is that I wanted these dark books to look dark, so applied -1 EV compensation to ensure this:



Spot metering goes one step further in that it only measures the very centre of the frame. This is very accurate, but only of we understand what it's doing and how it too needs compensation depending on the subject. If used without thought, exposures will be all over the place.

Except that you don't see that at all - try it and see.

Centre weighted metering will usually guarantee that whatever else you get you won't get blown out highlights. Matrix metering tends to be lighter, but its clever algorithms mean we don't actually know what it's thinking. It's fine for helping the non-technical but if we want to understand our meter then centre weighted or spot is the way to go.

Your second paragraph is back-to-front Nigel. Centre weighted metering will see the brightness of sky, think the light is brighter than it is and hence under-expose a scene.

However, using centre-weighted with intelligent use of exposure compensation will allow correct exposure pretty much 100% of the time. It was once all we had and we managed very well. Its advantage is that it allows precise control, without inclusion of the unknown algorithms of the matrix metering.

It's recommended for very long exposures, but using the regular DSLR system. LiveView is something else and it shouldn't be necessary in this instance.