I certainly have never seen any problems at all with my DA 16-45 regarding exposure. As you have said, it does require intelligent use of the light meter. If one were to set it to matrix metering and put a good portion of sky in the picture and just let the program automation do it's thing, you are very likely going to get something that appears to be underexposed as it tries not to blow out the sky.
When used with some thought, I haven't seen any real problems. Of course, much of what I read on dpreview seems like there is not much thought used when taking pictures - like the camera is the photographer instead of the person. Go figure... Bruce Tuesday, October 26, 2004, 3:25:12 PM, you wrote: JT> "Strange, I remember finding pictures from the 16-45 rather dark, and in JT> a german user forum there had been lots of lengthy discussions and JT> pictures about the 16-45 making too dark pictures." JT> On the dpreview Pentax DSLR discussion forum, one occasionally sees JT> complaints that the *ist D underexposes. JT> It is hard to evaluate these complaints. Has the person done Auto Levels JT> in Photoshop? If not, the image will appear dull, which might be JT> confused with dark. JT> But I also wonder if people who have this problem are using program JT> metering. In Pentax's film SLRs, program metering was designed to expose JT> for shadow areas -- so it would often blow out highlights or generally JT> overexpose. Since blown-out highlights make a digital image useless, I JT> wonder if program metering on the *ist D is biased toward toning down JT> highlights, thus making images darker. JT> I use center-weighted averaging for nearly all shots (a few are done JT> with spot metering), and find that my *ist D exposures are fine -- with JT> the DA 16-45 and all other lenses. JT> Joe
