Automatic White Balance

farss wrote on 8/29/2012, 4:23 PM
life used to be simple. We had:

Automatic White Balance.
Manual White Balance
Preset White Balance

Now it seems someone decided to change that, well at least in some cameras :(

Automatic White Balance is now Manual White Balance.
Manual White Balance is now Preset White Balance.

Except the "AWB" viewfinder indicator blinks if the camera believes the current scene differs from the white balance you'd set from a white card.

This only seems to apply to cameras based on stills camera. Thoroughly confussing, be warned. I'm not certain I have a full understanding of just how all this is meant to or does in fact work. I first ran up against this with the HXR-NX30 and again yesterday using my RX100 to shoot video. In the case of the latter the blinking AWB indicator was right, white balance was way off.

Anyone any the wiser?

Bob.

Comments

Tim20 wrote on 8/29/2012, 4:49 PM
My Sony HDR Ax2000 has the most confusing white balance in the world. I had to read the manual a million times. There is AWB, then saved A and B, plus preset indoor/outdoor. Then after that if you want to do a day for night you have to go into the white balance offset settings. My cheap Samsung is easy and actually pretty good at getting it right.

Oh and then I found out by accident the other day when I accidently hit a button that white balance offset is AS in the viewfinder. That took me an hr of thumbing through the manual to find out what AS meant. Thankfully it was set to zero so I didn't mess up 3 hrs of shooting.
farss wrote on 8/29/2012, 6:59 PM
Yes,
the HDCAM EX cameras aren't too bad when it comes to figuring out just what all the WB options are doing and you can optionally set two different manual WB values to "A" and "B". Other cameras such as the Z5 confuse me no end with too many buttons for what should be a simple enough task. Then there's the PMW-350 that has a two position momentary toggle switch on the front of the camera. Up is white balance and down is black balance. You wouldn't want to get mixed up and push that switch down in the middle of a shot.

Bob.
wwjd wrote on 8/30/2012, 3:23 PM
this won't help the OP, but those running Canon DLSR can use "Magic Lantern" update to add simple button press sensing adjusting WB. VERY handy! I love it.