Photography

Lime One gives vintage cameras a modern light meter

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The Lime One weighs a claimed 8 grams, and should reportedly run for months on a single coin battery
Hedeco
The Lime One is presently on Kickstarter
Hedeco
The Lime One is said to be easier to use than a separate handheld light meter or smartphone app
Hedeco
The Lime One weighs a claimed 8 grams, and should reportedly run for months on a single coin battery
Hedeco
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Fully-manual analog film cameras can be fun and interesting to use, but it sucks when they don't have a built-in light meter. That's where the Hedeco Lime One comes in, as it's a digital light meter that can be added to such cameras.

Designed by German mechatronics engineer Johannes Heberlein, the Lime One has an anodized aluminum body, an OLED display, utilizes a widely available CR2032 battery, and slides into the camera's existing shoe mount on top. Adapters are available for trickier mounting situations.

Through a combination of pressing a button on its side and turning its knurled control wheel, users are subsequently able to select the ISO of the film they're using, plus they can switch between the device's four exposure modes.

These modes include Aperture Priority (where the Lime One calculates the correct shutter speed for the current f-stop), Shutter Priority (where it provides the right f-stop for the current shutter speed), Manual, and Exposure Value. Because the device isn't electronically linked to the camera, users still have to manually select the present f-stop or shutter speed (using the wheel), and they have to physically adjust the aperture ring or shutter speed dial to the suggested settings.

The Lime One is said to be easier to use than a separate handheld light meter or smartphone app
Hedeco

And since users can't see the Lime One's display as they're looking through the camera's viewfinder, they can temporarily lock in its readings simply by holding its button down.

Should you be interested, the device is currently the subject of a Kickstarter campaign. A pledge of €129 (about US$153) will get you one, when and if it reaches production.

You can see it in use, in the video below.

Sources: Kickstarter, Hedeco

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2 comments
paul314
These kinds of tiny light meters used to be readily available in the days of actual manual film cameras, but I'd guess all the companies that made them have long since gone out of production. If you have the time to think about your shots, a separate light meter can be a useful accessory because it lets you figure out how much light is coming from which parts of your scene rather than just an overall number.
JeffK
paul314 - I had one of those meters in the mid sixties when I first got into photogtaphy. It used a selenium cell rather than cds, not as sensitive but also didn't require a battery. It was in an aluminium housing not much different than the one in the story and had a spring loaded cover with a small aperture over the photo cell. For normal on camera use to read the light reflected from your subject the cover was open, and for incident readings of the light source(s) you closed the cover. I bought it and the Argus C-3 35 mm camera to use it on for $5 each in 1966 at a second hand store.