Matt Bechberger studied electronics engineering and owned fifteen or twenty old cameras with selenium meters that had slowly died over sixty years. The cameras kept working while the meters went quiet. So he designed a tiny hot shoe meter, put it on Kickstarter, and it did well enough that he quit his job. That’s how Reveni Labs started. Today he designs every circuit board and enclosure himself, builds prototypes with a soldering oven and a microscope, and calibrates each unit against a Sekonic L-858 and a C-700, aiming for a tenth of a stop. Boards and enclosures come from China, and the rest (engraving, assembly, testing, shipping) happens in his shop in Ontario. I tested my Lumo next to what I called the Porsche and the Ferrari of light meters. Same readings. Faster startup.
We started with the basics, why anyone still carries an external light meter in 2026 and what separates incident from reflective readings, then went into details I had never thought about. Why the Spot Meter Mark III asks you to keep both eyes open, and how a customer with only one eye still uses it. The flash duration circuit Matt built from scratch for the Lumo, clearly the thing he’s proudest of. The wrist-worn incident meter that almost nobody bought, and the 80/20 rule of product design he took from that flop. I complained a bit about modern products all looking alike, black boxes with a PCB inside, compared to the old cars and cameras I love. Matt pointed out, fairly, that his black box outsold his weird one.
If you want to learn more and dive deeper into light meters, this is the article for you, enjoy the video!
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