Sekonic L-478DR still relevant a decade on?

Hand held light meters relevance may been less common with photographers but they arguably still have a niche, particular in studio/flash applications. Certainly the availability of new light meters on is infrequent, with Sekonic being the only real players left in the market with their L-308, L-478 and L-858 series. The mid range L478 was release ~2012 with a touch screen but how does it fare a decade on?


Having used a Minolta AutoMeter IVF, released in 1992, for ~15 years for incident flash metering, there was never a reason to upgrade except if it started to fail. Unfortunately this is the situation I found with the meter intermittently indicating low-battery even when fresh batteries. Switching the meter on/off repeated seems to get me a workaround but intermittent is downgrading itself to frequent.

This facilitated a replacement flash meter and hence the Sekonic L-478DR. The Sekonics are a little pricey but there are no real options: Minolta sold their camera and flash meter business many years ago, although Kenko bought the rights/designs of the AutoMeter (and resold it as KFM-1100) but Kenko have also discontinued these products too. The legacy and retired Sekonic meters, whilst reliable and well respected, (stupidly) used non-commodity batteries, such as CRxxx batteries. The base model Sekonic L308 is a meter I don't consider - the screen is small and there's some intangbile quantity that I don't like. So we've eliminated all options exept for the (AAA battery powered) L-478 and L-858 series and then we're eliminating based on excessive cost and features.

Sekonic L-478D(R) LiteMaster Pro Light Meter

The first thing to note of the Sekonic is that it's a little smaller and the touch screen. With the advent of smart phones and tablets over the last 20 years, its very noticable the Sekonic touch screen is not of the same quality, not even comparable to the original iPhone: the Sekonic screen is not as responsive but is adequate for swiping and tapping.

However the key comparison is incident metering accuracy.


^{Mintola reading non-sync value as triggerd by the Sekonic - note the slight difference in measurement}

With both the Minolta and Sekonic with no EV-adjustments, they are very close. Ambient metering is very very close with about a 1/10^th of a stop difference when metering at the same time with the diffusion domes adjacent. With flash, the difference is a little more noticable with the Sekonic measuing 1-2/10^ths hotter than the older Minolta. The Minolta AutoMeter IVF compared to an even older Minolta Flash Meter III are consistent in their measurements.

The Sekonic is a good replacement over the Minolta and the "DR" model is radio equipped model allows remote triggering of PocketWizard lights - the radio traigger is a non-upgradable fetaure (other common radio trigger systems such as Elinchrom also available) and supports the basic legacy 433Mhz/344Mhz Channels 1-4 and upgrade channels 5-32 along side the remote power controls.

Like the Minolta, there is no reflective spot metering functionality without an option add on, there is no tripod screw attachment but the Sekonic provides an retractable diffusion dome for metering of flat document copy-work. There are mnay additional features of the Sekonic but one great feature is the flash analysis function which in flash incident mode will confirm the % of reading contributed to flash.

Some other features that are less important to me include the Cine and Lux mode as well as a custom camera calibration mode offered by their Data Transfer Sofware as well as firmware upgrades, even though the new meter arrived with 20_01.016 (referenced by Sekonic documentation as of Dec 2015) which appears to the most recent version.

Would I have bought this if my Minolta was not dying? No. It's still reasonably expensive a decade following its release but because there are few alternatives on the market, the Sekonic holds its value - the second hand market prices for used 20-30 year old meters are ~£100 so not cheap. If I were going in fresh, with no previous meter, to buy a new incident meter in 2024, would I buy this Sekonic model, with the radio trigger? Most likely given its features but there is a lot of feature-scope that aren't required but given the light meter market and available options, there is not much of a choice.