After many years of good service, our Sony F717 is finally flaking
out on us. Time to look for a replacement.
The Sony is a good camera, but its Achilles heel is color fidelity.
My wife uses it for product photos, and she spends way too much time
correcting things in post processing. Now I'm not talking about
white balance problems, which can be fixed with manual WB, or
saturation, which can be adjusted easily with the most basic
software. I'm talking about situations where one hue will be dead on
and another will be way off.
Are there any cameras which are especially good at getting the colors
right?
No. They all basically start with the same sensors, so for the most part, they all get the colors about as "right" as each other. But every now and then, you run into one where someone has done something strange in the software, and you get one that's especially good at getting the colors wrong
This is often done in an attempt to make the colors more "pleasing", and that works for some kinds of photography, but can drive a product photographer up the wall.
I do product (just guessing) at a bit higher end then you, and I use the calibration procedure Richard recommended. Shoot the Macbeth checker with the lights you use for your product work, run the calibrator script, and then process your raws with the settings the script gives you.
It will compensate for both inaccuracies in the camera, and in the lighting (to some extent). As he mentioned, it requires a $80 Macbeth "ColorChecker" target. You might find that investing $80 in the Macbeth will bring your 717 up to the level that you need. Do you shoot raw now? Can the 717 shoot raw?
The next big problem is the lights themselves. Do you perhaps have one of those "product photography kits" you find online, the kind with two or three aluminum reflectors a bout a foot in diameter, with spiral "compact fluorescent" lights in them? Those lights are the worst. You can get your white balance perfect, and still have your reds horribly off. You can even run the calibrator action, which will give you perfect whites, reds, greens, and blues, but still have magenta way off. And it's all because of the lights...
Unfortunately, Cameras have only a very basic concept of lighting, they like lighting where the spectrum is "smooth" (hard to describe without drawing). That kind of light includes sunlight, electronic flashes, and incandescent (good old "hot filament" light bulbs we've been using for 100 years) lighting. Lighting with weird spectrums, full of sharp peaks and valleys, makes more work for the calibrator, you may find yourself needing to do "near hue" adjustments, like having an extra magenta tweak. And that "peaks and valleys" lighting leads to a problem called "illuminant metamerism". You can mix two colors that have very different spectra, but look the same to the human eye. Then, change the lighting, and suddenly the two colors look nothing like each other. This is a royal problem in product work, because you may have colors from multiple "domains" in the same product. You have a plastic part that has been dyed to a color with organic compounds and a painted part where the colors come from ground mineral pigments. They look fine under the "smooth" lights like sunlight or incandescent, but as soon as you put them under the fluorescent, one of the colors "shifts" away from the other.
Better lighting just solves so many problems. Doesn't have to be expensive lighting, a couple of "alien bees" studio strobes can provide many years of reliable service for the small shop.
--
Rahon Klavanian 1912-2008.
Armenian genocide survivor, amazing cook, scrabble master, and loving grandmother. You will be missed.
Ciao! Joseph
http://www.swissarmyfork.com 
