The average among the cameras we've tested is +0.7 EV, so the A55 performed better than average here. Outdoors, the Sony A55V performed well, requiring just +0.3 EV exposure compensation to keep the model's face bright in our "Sunlit" Portrait shot. Very good results under harsh lighting, with good handling of contrast, detail, and exposure.
(Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.) The Sony A55 required +0.3 EV positive exposure compensation here, which is average for this shot. The 2,600 Kelvin setting which matches the color temperature of our lights resulted in a slightly cool, bluish image.
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The Manual setting was very accurate, though some may prefer Incandescent because it conveys a touch more of the warmth of the original lighting. Results with the Incandescent setting were quite good, just slightly warm. Indoors, under normal incandescent lighting, color balance was overly warm with the Auto white balance setting. About average amount of positive exposure compensation required. Very warm cast with Auto, but good color with the Incandescent and Manual settings. You can adjust contrast, saturation, and sharpness for any of the settings. The Sony A55 offers six preset "Creative Style" options. (The cyan to blue shift is very common among the digital cameras we test we think it's a deliberate choice by camera engineers to produce better-looking sky colors.) With an average "delta-C" color error of only 4.59 after correction for saturation, overall hue accuracy was very good much better than average. The Sony A55 did push cyan toward blue, red toward orange, orange toward yellow and yellow toward green, but shifts were relatively minor.
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Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc. Here, when adjusted for the correct white balance, the Sony A55 did well, producing natural-looking skin tones.
This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. See the comparison of available "Creative Style" image options below. You can of course tweak saturation to your liking, or choose a different color mode. The A55's overall color saturation is about average for its class. Like many cameras, the Sony A55V pushes strong reds, dark blues and some greens, purples and browns just a little, but actually undersaturates light greens, and cyan tones slightly. Thus, hue-accurate, highly saturated colors appear as lines radiating from the center. Hue changes as you travel around the center. More saturated colors are located toward the periphery of the graph. In the diagram above, the squares show the original color, and the circles show the color that the camera captured. Very good overall accuracy and saturation, with only minor shifts in hue and intensity.