[boondaburrah]

I have an Olympus XA that similarly has a light meter that's active when the shutter's open and closes it when it's "full."

It actually has two light meters, and one of the problems it can have (mine did) is that the light meter that tells you what your exposure will be in the view finder and the light meter inside the body may not agree. The issue was that the internal meter became far slower such that I would see a (correct) value in the viewfinder and then the film would be overexposed by 2 stops. I tested this using slide film and lying to the camera about the ISO by 2 stops and suddenly everything wasn't blown out anymore.

There's a potentiometer hidden inside the body that you can use to adjust the internal sensor's timing (fill rate?) and using audacity to measure the ms between shutter clicks I was able to adjust it to match the viewfinder's reading again.