Metering
During the course of my test the XZ-1 had to deal with a variety of lighting situations, both inside and out, and the 324-zone multi-pattern sensing system coped admirably. As you would expect of any camera, it isn’t infallible but there were only a few occasions when I had to add any sort of exposure compensation. One of these was to lighten images I’d taken in a church. Here, +1EV was needed to bring out detail in the shadows, as the bright light from stained-glass windows fooled the camera’s meter.
As you would expect in a high-end compact camera, centreweighted and spot metering is on hand for more difficult lighting conditions. I would have liked Olympus to have included the highlight and shadow spot metering found on the Pen and E-series cameras in the XZ-1. These settings would be useful with the lower dynamic range of the compact camera sensor and would really give it something its competitors lack.
Olympus XZ-1 Metering: Score – 8/10
