Kickstarter Tech Project of the Week: Lumu

Project Name: Lumu – bringing Light Meter to the 21st Century
Category: Product Design
Goal: $20,000 – met in less than five hours
Currently Funded: $159,166
Deadline for pledging: July 12, 2013

PCMag's senior digital camera analyst, Jim Fisher, spends all his working hours testing, shooting with, and evaluating the newest digital cameras on the market. When he shoots for fun on the weekends however, he picks up film cameras. But a few of his favorites—a Leica M3 and a Rolleiflex Automat—don't have light meters in the body.

Cue Lumu, a light meter for your iPhone. The folks at Lumu Labs wanted to make the device smaller than a quarter, yet more accurate than your traditional light meter and connected to the cloud. Lumu uses a sensor with the same "spectral response" as the human eye, with a measuring range of .15 to 250,000 lux (EV -4 to 20) and accuracy of +/- 0.1 EV. "There is no darkness too dark and no light too bright which Lumu can't measure," the team claims. The app lets you record data like location, voice notes, pictures, and photo parameters.

While Jim has a couple of traditional meters—a big Minolta flash meter from the 70s and a shoe-mount Sekonic TwinMate—he often resorts to the Pocket Light Meter iOS app since he always has his iPhone with him. It gives him a live view "digital Polaroid" of what he'll get with a certain ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, but he finds it sometimes falls short as it doesn't give an accurate reading in extremely bright light or in very dark conditions.

Jim found Lumu intriguing enough to jump in as an Early Bird backer. "It's small enough to live in my camera bag, and I almost always have my iPhone with me when I'm shooting—I use it to record lens changes when shooting a roll. The ability to take a more traditional incident reading is a plus, and hopefully will help me nail exposures with emulsions with narrow exposure latitudes like Kodak Ektar."

The $79 rewards have already sold out, but for a $99 pledge you can join Jim and get a Lumu pack by October.

Interested in backing other neat tech projects? Check out SONTE, a Wi-Fi-enabled smart film that changes your window's transparency, and +POOL, a pool aiming to float in (and filter) New York's East River.