Topic: Sekonic Twin Mate, how do you like yours?

[John Robison]

Looking for anyone here with experience owning a Sekonic Twin Mate meter. I need a new handheld meter and with not too much money the Sekonic looks nice in it's specifications. However, I'm interested in owner/user impressions. If you have had yours for a while, 1 to 2 years, how has it held up?

Thanks for any impressions, good or bad.

John Robison

[DonkeyDave]

I've had mine for at least 5 years - its really small, and for B+W or colour negative it appears to be all you need, the incident metering seems to work pretty well.
I use it as a pocketable - or camera mountable meter. I had less success with it for tricky lighting with transparency, where I really needed a spot meter.
Highly recommended.

[tkmedia]

I dont really like the twin mate mostly for the size, just too small for me...

[Abdul Hye]

I’ve had mine for a few years now. It works fine for me. I never had any luck with second hand meters and this was the cheapest, new, I could find. There was an issue with the contacts of the battery which I fixed with a bit of cardboard in the battery compartment.

[LT]

John, I bought one a few months ago. It is very light and plasticky, but also very manageable and handy.

My only problem with it is that I only get a true light reading on the second push of the button when the meter hasn't been used for a while.  Its easy to deal with this by making sure to always press the button twice.

[KevinAllan]

I've had mine for about three years. It's pretty reliable in reflected mode and I like the fact that the needle doesn't jump around widely, which happens on some meters.

In incident mode, I've been less confident in the readings but I really need to do a proper comparison with my Sekonic L758 to assess the accuracy of the twinmeter in incident mode.

I moved on to the L758 (spot + everything + makes the tea) because, apart from the spot function, I wanted a meter that would measure at lower light levels. But it's not fair to compare the two meters because the L758 costs about four times as much as the twinmeter. I still carry the twinmeter occasionally, usually when I'm likely to be handholding the camera and also want to be relatively inobtrusive. In fact I wish the L758 had the averaged reflective function that the twinmeter has - you can't exactly whip out a grey card and place it in the scene if you're doing street photography.