This series of tests intentionally creates a situation of hightly contrasting bright and shadowed areas that go beyond the camera's dynamic range. The exposure compensation is set to -1 and the bracketing is set to +/- 1.3. There are two sets of three shots. Each set is arranged vertically. The 3 shots on the left were taken using the 'center-weighted averaging' metering mode (-2.3, -1, and +0.3 EV), the 3 shots on the right were taken using evaluative metering. Note that the camera default is Evaluative.

The Boat and Kitchen series were taken with the AF frame focused on a dark area (the wall). The Office series was taken with the AF frame focused on the bright lawn chair on the deck. I chose to time the shot such that there was very little direct sunlight hitting the inside areas and a huge amount of direct sunlight hitting the outside areas, so nearly all the light on the inside areas is ambient.

I can draw a couple of conclusions from my tests. Operating on the assumption that we will always do a little post-production in a PC-based photoeditor the goal should be for the dark areas to not be so dark that they will look washed out when we apply gamma correction on the PC, and for the light areas to not be so light that they h saturate the CCD to pure white (making in-PC editing of those areas impossible). It is fairly clear to me that the camera over-exposes a bright scene by default (0 EV), which is why my tests centered around -1 EV rather then 0 EV. As you can see, the 0.3 EV shots are quite reasonable even for a fairly dark office, but they definitely over-expose the brightest areas. By a lot! -2.3 EV is clearly too dark to be able to get a good post-production result on the PC, and the brightest areas of the 0.3 EV shot are clearly too light for the same. Even -1 EV is just slightly too dark to get really good results in post-production so what I suggest is that the camera be centered around -0.3 EV. If you use 3-exposure bracket a good setup would be +/- 0.6EV (i.e. -1 EV, -0.3 EV, +0.3 EV). The advantage of using -0.3 EV is that it virtually guarentees that you will be able to do at least some post-production correction over the entire range lighting conditions you might be dealing with.

Click on the pic for the full 2272x1704 view.

	Center-Weighted	Evaluative
-2.3 EV
-1 EV
+0.3 EV
-2.3 EV
-1 EV
+0.3 EV
-2.3 EV
-1 EV
+0.3 EV