On Sun, 19 May 2002 05:34:48 GMT, John Russell wrote:
>On Fri, 17 May 2002 23:55:29 -0400, "Dr. Judith Mazza"
> wrote:
>>1. Are you satisfied with the touch screen, are the menus confusing?

>My only complaint with the touch screen is that I need to constantly
>use it to spot meter. Otherwise the picture gets too dark or all
>washed out even moving around just within a small area. It also
>forgets the metering setting when turned off, so it's inconvenient to
>save the batteries when you don't need to shoot for a few minutes.

??????????
As I have pointed out before, true spotmetering is the
quickest way to poor exposure... If you enable the
touch-screen spot metering, you are locking the exposure
to a most-often-incorrect overall value. Better exposure
is likely if you remain in autoexposure mode. If the
camera permitted this (the 3-chip Sonys do), even better
would be biasing the auto exposure control, as needed.
Short this, it used to be easy with "button-and-wheel"
camera controls to lock the overall exposure (as the
spot metering mode does) and modify it as needed with
the handy wheel (instead of using the cumbersome
touch-screen controls for manual exposure and shifting,
or for trying to keep up with spot metering needs).
Alternatively, you can try the "spotlight" program mode,
if your subject lighting requires it... (this also
biases the exposure towards a slightly darker picture,
often useful).