Nine percent, Andy. Yes, 9%. Only they call it "partial metering", perhaps because at 9% the term "spot" would be ridiculous. With my 20Ds I frequently miss the spot metering capabilities of my old digiscoping cameras (Nikon CP4500s and Canon A95). I'm not sure what percentage their "spot" metering was, but the effective percentage was quite small because of the massive zoom the scope provided.
Before anyone jumps up and down and says "no-one really needs spot metering", I'll repeat what I said already in another thread (possibly at another site - I get mixed up from time to time): for birding, sometimes you just don't get a chance to get a rare bird in good light. Sometimes the only chance you get is rather too far away and straight into the sun/bright cloud. You need spot metering then because you don't have time to take multiple manual exposures and chimp it till you get it right. You often only have a few moments, and the fastest way to get the bird correctly exposed is to lay your centre spot on a suitably-shaded part of the plumage and let the background blow out. You can paste some nice blue sky or something in later on with photoshop - you have any number of nice background shots you can take that from - or just darken it up and blur it out, but you can't ever recover the bird details. So long as you have the presence of mind to lay your centre spot in a sensible place, you might not get a great shot, but you will get a usable shot, and that is a lot better than nothing.
That's the great thing with spot metering: it's instant. If you can see a spot anywhere in the frame that will give you the exposure you want, you can just grab it, and not risk missing things because you were fiddling about changing settings on the camera.
I think Canon's decision to add spot metering to the 3D was a very wise one. Maybe it was a last-minute decision: Canon have resisted spot metering in non-professional SLRs for so long now that it seemed as though they would never do it, but perhaps they looked at the D200 when it first came out and, although the main specs of the 30D would have been set in concrete by then, felt obliged to offer a little something to make the 30D more competitive. Whatever, I don't care. All I know is that I am no longer faced with the ugly choices of either dropping a fortune by selling all my Canon glass and going Nikon, or else spending a fortune on a professional-grade Canon body. (Would I have done either of these? Well, not right away, but the thoughts had already crossed my mind. Arm me with a credit card, and that kind of thinking is dangerous.)
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