[Bill Burk]

Really? Even camera flare (light bouncing around in the camera even with flat black surfaces, light reflecting off the emulsion adding to this)?

Right. The light would bounce around just the same, only it would be proportionally dimmer.

Now I use Zones loosely in this discussion. When I test film it's with a sensitometer. Then I work in Zones as I study my graphs because I find it easy to get my head around. I imagine where the different Zones will fall on the curve. I look at Zone I and lift that point to the Y-axis coordinate corresponding to about Zone II (I say about, because I look 0.4 LogE to the right). The difference is a certain number of Meter-Candle-Seconds which I take and "add" to each of the coordinates of my step wedge. Flare's impact quickly tapers off. But this is how I take a sensitometer test and make it agree with light meter marked with Zone System grays.

In a sense I call the camera test you describe as a no-flare test. Even though the camera introduces flare. I say no-flare because the amount of flare at Zone V exposure is about what would take Zone I up to Zone II. BUT, in a camera test you stop down four stops and it no longer brings you from Zone I to Zone II. Now it only takes Zone -III to Zone -II (which is to say 'nada').