White Balance (10.53)

Automatic White Balance (10.3)

The automatic white balance setting produced exceptionally accurate results when shooting under daylight illumination, and also scored well when shooting under fluorescent light. The problem arose under incandescent lights, which produced images that were distinctly over-warm. On balance, though, the A900 scored well here.

Custom White Balance (10.75)

Taking a custom white balance reading effectively solved the problem we’d experienced when shooting under incandescent lights using the automatic white balance system. There were color accuracy improvements under fluorescent and daylight illumination as well, but these were already quite close to ideal values under auto white balance.

Shooting under daylight illumination using auto white balance, all of the cameras produced slightly cool results, though the offsets from the ideal for the Sony A900 and Nikon D700 are trivial.

There is a grim consistency to the inability of automatic white balance systems to cope adequately with incandescent lighting which, considering that’s still the source of most household illumination, is profoundly not a good thing. The warming trend is less severe for the Sony A900 than for most of the competition, as shown below, though there’s still an uncomfortable orange hue to the images shot on auto.

It’s interesting that both Sony and Nikon warm up their images when shooting on auto under fluorescents, while Canon errs in the cooler direction, but not enough that you’d notice without a lab at your disposal.

Taking both automatic and custom white balance accuracy into account, the Sony produces acceptable but not impressive overall results when compared to the other cameras in our roundup. The tests are conducted using a controlled lighting system that produces consistent color temperatures for each illumination setting. Images are analyzed using Imatest, which compares the captured colors to the ideal values from the X-Rite color chart.