Originally posted by Lowell Goudge so much for High tech in the cameras
Heh, indeed. But when you strip down how light metering works, it is based on an assumption that allows it to be easily fooled (the assumption being that any given scene coming through the camera's lens will reflect, on average, the amount reflected by a mid-tone gray). The ever higher tech cameras do not escape the boundaries of this basic assumption, they just use multiple readings and computer algorithms and such to make the guesswork more sophisticated. At the end of the day, however, while the successful proportion of guesses might improve, correct exposures from reflected light meters remain a happy accident based on the same original assumption being used in a more sophisticated fashion.
An incident light reading, by contrast, strips the metering process down to one without guesswork, since incident meters measure the light directly, giving you an accurate exposure every time. Only brightly lit scenes with lots of snow or sand (which add reflected light to the original source) need any "compensation" vs. the original reading. In bright sun, of course, (assuming you're not within 2 hrs of sunrise or sunset) Sunny 16 works like a charm, and you don't even need a meter, as Canada_Rockies indicated.