Zone Light Meter 1.4: Bigger Text, Favourites, B&W Filters

Where 1.4 came from

After the last release went out, I shared it in a few Facebook groups for film shooters and read every reply. The useful ones were very specific. One photographer wears glasses and couldn't make out the small captions. Another reads the screen outdoors and said the grey labels disappear in bright light. A Minolta CLE owner wanted his own lenses at the top of the list instead of scrolling past a thousand others every time, and asked whether he could see what a red filter would do to the scene before screwing it on. An XPan shooter asked for the 24x65 frame. And somebody wanted the Minolta Autocord, the TLR a lot of people bought instead of a Rolleiflex.

All of that is in 1.4. The app is still free on Android and iPhone, with no ads and nothing to buy.

Text you can read with your glasses off

There is now a Text size setting under Settings, with four steps: Default, Large, Larger and Largest. They multiply whatever font size your phone is already set to, so if your phone is already on large text you get both. The combined size stops at the largest size the phone itself offers.

It doesn't grow everything by the same amount, and that was on purpose. The shutter speed and aperture in the middle of the screen are already big, so they barely move. The small captions, chip labels and dial titles grow the most, because those are what you squint at. Every screen follows it: dials, calculators, menus, help pages, the first-run wizard and the tours.

Everyone gets a readability floor too, even on Default. Nothing in the app is drawn under 10 sp now, the smallest label style went from 11 to 12 sp, and the secondary grey text in the Classic and Paper themes has more contrast. If you thought the old Paper theme looked faded outdoors, it was. That one is on me.

Star the gear you own

Every row in the camera, lens and film pickers has a star at the right end. Tap it and that item jumps into a Favourites group at the top of the list, and it stays there whichever way you are browsing: brand chip, format tab, the B&W and Color switch, or a search. A Favourites chip at the start of the brand row hides everything you haven't starred.

Stars belong to the app, not to a profile. If you keep one profile for the Rolleiflex and another for the Nikon, the same HP5 and the same lenses stay starred in both. Tapping a star never selects the row, so you can go through your whole shelf in one sitting.

Preview a contrast filter before you mount it

Turn on the B&W preview, then put a contrast filter on the filter ring the way you would for the exposure: yellow 8, orange 21, red 25, green 11 or blue 47. With the red 25 mounted, the live view turns into roughly what panchromatic film records through a red filter. Blue sky goes dark, brick goes pale, green leaves sink. The B&W filter preview also applies to the frozen still after you meter and to the photo saved in the shot log, so you can flick through all five on the same frame and compare.

The exposure follows the filter, because it is the same filter: the meter opens up three stops for the red 25 straight away. Previewing red means shooting red. When you take the filter off, set the ring back to none or your next frame will be over.

The channel weights come from Kodak's published Wratten transmission tables, the spectral sensitivity of T-MAX 100 and Tri-X 400, and daylight. Still, it is a simulation. A phone sensor isn't film, clipped colour can't be brought back, and a very saturated red or blue can move a little more or less on the negative than on screen. Yellow 8 and green 11 change the picture least, which matches what they do on real film. If you want the background on which filter does what, the contrast filter guide covers it.

24x65 and 6x17 on the format dial

One click past 35mm on the FMT dial is now 24x65, the Hasselblad XPan frame, shown as a 2.71:1 strip. Past 6x9 sits 6x17, the 3:1 strip a Fuji GX617 lays across 120, four frames to a roll. Both are covered under panoramic formats in the docs.

In Gear mode the camera you pick decides what the dial offers. An XPan, XPan II, Fuji TX-1 or TX-2 gives you 35mm and 24x65 and starts on 24x65, since that is why most people carry one. A Mamiya 7 or 7 II offers 6x7 and 24x65 (the frame of Mamiya's panoramic adapter kit) and starts on 6x7. A GX617 locks to 6x17. Not sure which bodies qualify? Equipment has a Panoramic tab now, sitting between LF and Cine, and it trims the camera list down to the strip shooters and the lens list down to the glass that fits them.

Honest limit: a panorama is far wider than its diagonal suggests. The XPan 45mm covers about 72 degrees across the frame, and a phone main camera can't. The app switches to the ultra-wide when it needs to, and if that still falls short it tells you how much of the width you are seeing. Hold the phone sideways with Flip Orientation on and you get more. More on shooting these formats in the panoramic film guide.

A lot more Minolta, and specs that were wrong

The catalogue gained 37 bodies and 26 interchangeable lenses. Most are Minolta: the whole Autocord TLR family plus the Minoltacord and Minoltaflex, the M-Rokkor 28, 40 and 90 for the CLE along with Leica's Summicron-C 40 and Elmar-C 90, the XG line, and the Maxxum xi and si autofocus bodies. The Fuji TX-1 and TX-2 came in with the panoramic work. There is a Minolta film camera guide if you are deciding between any of them.

Adding cameras meant checking old ones against manuals, and about 55 values on existing entries were wrong. Some changed how the meter behaves. The Minolta CLE now reads a slowest speed of 1 s and flash sync at 1/60. The XPan II's slowest speed was a nonsense number and is now 8 s. The Maxxum 800si goes to 30 s instead of 8. The SR-1, SR-2 and SR-7 sync at 1/50, not 1/60. Rolleicord III to Vb now reach 1/500 instead of stopping at 1/300. The CLE was also listed twice, once under Leica and once under Minolta, and those entries are merged. Saved profiles and presets that used the old Leica entry still open on the right camera.

Fixes you might have hit

The green 11 filter factor was set to 1 stop. Kodak's own data for panchromatic film in daylight gives it 4x, which is 2 stops, and that is what the app uses now. If you shot green-filtered rolls with an older version and they came back thin, this is why. Old shot log entries keep the factor they were recorded with.

Creating a new profile used to wipe the app's global settings: the onboarding and tour flags (so the tour ran again) and your picker sort preferences. It doesn't any more. Seventy-three medium format lenses (Mamiya 7, Pentax 645, Bronica, Fuji GX680 and others) were filed under the 35mm tab in Equipment and now sit under MF. Flip Orientation is remembered after you close the app. And a preset saved in Custom mode no longer changes your format or focal length when you swipe to it.

If something in 1.4 is wrong for your camera, say so in the same groups. Most of this list exists because someone did.