Metering is the process your camera uses to determine how bright or dark to auto expose a scene. In the days of film, metering was exceptionally important because you wouldn’t know if you exposed a shot properly until after you developed your film. With digital cameras, you can instantly glance at your photo and immediately know whether the camera over- or under-exposed the shot, and make any adjustments necessary. Additionally, if you shoot raw, you can often adjust the exposure one or two stops in either direction and still get excellent results. So, even if your camera does expose the picture incorrectly and you can’t adjust exposure compensation and re-shoot, you can still get a great result. For those reasons, metering systems are much less important than they were in the film days. Nonetheless, higher-end cameras tend to have more advanced metering systems that will more accurately expose complex scenes, such as heavily backlit scenes. The differences between metering systems aren’t significant enough to influence your camera choice, however.
