White balance and colour
Given the intended market, it is a fair assumption that the white balance setting of the NEX-5 will mostly remain in its AWB mode. In bright sunlight and overcast conditions the AWB mode did a good job of correctly setting the appropriate white balance. However, when set to AWB and under tungsten lighting, the automatic mode seemed to do very little to reduce the orange/yellow colour cast. Switching the white balance to the tungsten setting quickly rectifies this issue and, for fine-tuning the strength of any of the preset white balance settings, ±3 strength adjustments are available.
Photographers who require even more control over the white balance will be pleased to hear that the NEX-5 features both a custom white balance setting and the ability to manually set the white balance by setting the colour temperature and magenta/green colour level.
In early Sony Alpha cameras, the only way Adobe RGB could be selected was via the Creative Style options. Like the latest Alpha DSLRs, the NEX-5 has the option of choosing between sRGB and Adobe RGB colour spaces separately from the Creative Style options. This means that any one of the six different Creative Styles can be selected independently of whether the camera is in the sRGB or Adobe RGB colour space.
Despite there being six Creative Styles, including black & white, portrait and vivid, there is no custom settings that can be saved. However, each of the six Creative Styles can have its contrast, saturation and sharpness adjusted to suit your particular taste.
