Cameras

The Best Cameras for Color Reproduction, Ranked

May 9, 2019

By Greg Scoblete

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This article, first published in has been in June 2018, was updated on October 21, 2019.

When it comes to reproducing colors, not all cameras are created equal. If you’re interested in discovering which camera does the best job reproducing colors, we’ve collected data from our testing partner, Image Engineering, and ranked cameras from most to least accurate.

How Image Engineering Tests for Color

Image Engineering sets the camera color space to sRGB using the factory default for a color profile.

To measure color reproduction, they use color patches within the TE42 test target. The colors in these patches have been selected with reference to the well-known X-Rite ColorChecker SG color target. Each of the 96 color patches is individually measured using a calibrated spectrophotometer. Reference data is provided to the analysis software along with the image being tested. With the knowledge of the RGB color space (the commonly used sRGB), they convert the RGB data to the CIE-LAB color space. Based on the LAB color space, they calculate color error and differences in brightness, saturation and color tone.

Each camera test produces a chart which shows color deviations (Delta E). Red cells indicate that the camera produced a strong deviation from the reference color, light green represents a “noticeable” deviation and dark green represents a moderate. For our list, we tallied the total number of noticeable and strong deviations for each camera. Strong deviations were weighted double and the list was generated accordingly. The actual color data, plus the deviations, is included in each entry.

(If you’d like the full breakdown of how Image Engineering tests cameras across a variety of metrics, pour yourself a strong cup of coffee and read this.)

The Caveats

Image Engineering has only been conducting tests for us since 2017, so its catalog of results is still limited relative to the entire universe of available cameras. In other words, this list isn’t exhaustive though it does encompass a wide range of models and will be updated regularly as new cameras are tested.