L.D. Meter from CHI Review – A shoe mount light meter with a useful little laser.

First, I shall set the scene: My name is James and I can’t zone focus.

It feels good to get that off my chest. I been a photographer for a while now, I take it pretty seriously and among the things I’m bad at, I’m bad at zone-focusing.

This isn’t an affliction that fazes me particularly often because I steer clear of zone-focus cameras. That was until a few weeks ago when I finally bought one of my unicorns. It’s a Fujica G617 and it’s a beaut. For the unfamiliar the G617 brings a spartan and condensed functionality to panoramic photography. It has a fixed large-format lens, (a 105mm f/8) an optical viewfinder, a shutter you have to cock, and the option to absent-mindedly double expose a 6x17cm negative.

One thing it definitely doesn’t have is any kind of visual focus confirmation, you just have the scale on the lens. This means that after years of avoiding it, I finally have a genuine need to know how far away things are.

The reason you clicked the link

This is how I find myself using the LD Meter from CHI. It’s another shoe-mount light meter in the plethora that have hit the market in the last few years. This one has a trick up its sleeve, it has an in built laser rangefinder. One tap on the button and you know your exposure settings and how far away to focus.

This is almost a little too perfect for my somewhat niche needs. (I’ve been looking at laser measures in DIY stores for this application and for a couple of others too.)

The device is nicely sized, narrower but taller than my KEKS KM02 (my other shoe mount meter) and it feels lightweight but still sturdy. The foot is metal and secured with two screws, there are two available positions for the foot, one in the centre and the other offset.

The screen is bright, pleasantly sized and clear. The controls are tidy, considered and nicely actualised. They’re intuitive enough to muddle your way through to a basic understanding without reading the manual.

The meter measures reflected light and offers aperture and shutter priority metering modes. Once you’ve set your ISO and made your choice, then you can wheel through your options quickly and easily. For quick metering on the go it feels like a real solution.

There’s a separate on/off switch for the laser, so if you’re rolling with a rangefinder in good light you don’t have to fire it.

You can select imperial and metric units for your distance measurements, and the reading always includes an EV measurement for those that want that sort of thing.

The LD Meter doesn’t have all of the options and features that the KEKS KM02 has. This reduced option list isn’t the deal breaker it could be. The KEKS regularly confuses me when I pick it up for the first time in a month and I can’t remember what the unmarked buttons do.

There are no nested menus to get lost in on the LD Meter, so I can use it more quickly and more efficiently. I can just crack on and shoot, the simplicity feels freeing rather than being an impediment.

Playing with the LD Meter out of the box I was immediately smitten. I set about measuring the distance to the wall of my studio, to my foot, the length of my upstairs landing. The laser is great in low light and close up, it does get a bit harder to track when you’re outside in daylight but it’s doable.

I set the meter up with a metre stick to check its performance, and it’s very accurate at short distances, returning measures down to the centimetre. It measures to or from its own front panel, which is unlikely to be aligned with the focal plane of the camera. While it’s hard to think of a use case where that could be an issue it’s probably worth knowing. (The only situation I could think of was shooting a large format snapshot camera shot wide open, very niche.)

I haven’t had the meter long enough to know whether it can achieve the advertised 90 day standby time, but I’ve had no issues with battery life in the time that I’ve had it. The meter packs an internal 370mAh USB-C rechargeable battery, (significantly bigger than the 220mAh one in my KEKs). I’ve found that my Reveni Labs Mk1 light meter eats LR44s while it’s sat on my shelf and my Keks KM02 is always flat when I go to use it. The LD Meter seems to hold a charge really well.

Field of view

Conscious that my use of the meter on a panoramic camera might not be as useful to you as it is to me, I figured I should use the meter in a more audience coherent fashion.

I stuck the meter on the top of my M4-P for the second half of a roll of Portra. It sits nicely on top of the Leica, once you’ve moved the foot to one side to stop it occluding the shutter dial, and is a delight to use.

Unfortunately the film I was using had been thoroughly irradiated by too many trips through airport x-ray machines to make decent pictures, but the metering appears uniform across the roll, the first half with the Keks, the second with the LD.

It’s worth noting that the meter I’m testing is the Pro version, which meters a 7° field of view. I’d actually prefer the Lite version which meters a 30° vector, similar to that of the KEKS KM02 which I’ve come to trust over the last few years.

One really cool function in low light is the option to click the laser to always on while focusing, and watch the two red dots align in your rangefinder patch. (You have to then switch it off to not then include the laser dot in your photograph, and aiming it at people can raise an eyebrow.)

When the time came to use the LD Meter with the panoramic camera, the Pro version felt a little like a confused half-step. The 7° field of view is meant for measuring highlights and shadows separately, but with the camera framed up on a tripod, this meant taking the meter off the cold-shoe and using it handheld. The LD’s ergonomics, while perfect for ‘on the shoe’ operation, fall down once this becomes a hand held device, becoming fiddly and hard to aim. It is better suited to compact and rangefinder use, which is hardly surprising.

Conclusions

I’m happy with the LD Meter’s metering and the measurement. It’s a tough one to double check as I don’t have anything else that meters a 7° field of view, and it offers different readings to my other meters, most likely due to differing field of view. It’s usually with 2/3rds of a stop. I’m convinced that the Lite version would make a superb addition to the top plate of any compact, particularly when paired with a forgiving C41 film.

The G617 is an expensive camera to run, costing me about the same per shot as my large format camera. In practice, given the expense and relative newness of the Fuji to me, I found myself metering as I do with large format, using my Sekonic Spot Meter, but using the LD and the Fuji’s focussing chart to nail my focus. Moving between these three prevented me from making any focus or exposure errors on my first jaunt out with the G617.

The LD is absolutely going to live on top of my Leica for the foreseeable future. I like the operational simplicity too much not to. It will also travel with the big Fuji when I go out with that.

There’s an also a decent chance there’s a *Lite* version of this meter in my future.

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