"Less Megapixels = Better Color"...

All these overly technical explanations don't have any ground to stand on. How do I know? Because if bigger pixels = better color, then the A7iii would have much better colors than the A7riii. And the A7s should blow them both away.

But nobody talks about the great colors from the A7s cameras, because they are the same as the other Sony cameras.

They are called "Sony colors" because most people know digital cameras get colors from the software processing. It's the camera's processor which converts the raw sensor signals  into the digital files we actually see.

Some people said older cameras were more "color accurate" and that's why their photos looked better. I think it's probably the opposite. Older cameras were less accurate, for better or worse.

Less accurate color is not always a bad thing. For example, many people love how film photos look, and most film is not accurate at all. In fact, different films were designed to distort certain channels of color.

I've actually noticed a lot of companies that had background in film cameras get praised for the colors of their early digital cameras. Fuji, Canon, Pentax. This is probably not a coincidence. The early cameras of these companies probably had software that made photos look good if not always accurate.

I think as sensors have become more advanced, they now are more accurate. It just makes sense that better technology exists now to calibrate colors and make them match reality. But that can end up with flat photos, razor sharp from corner to corner, but a flat mirror of reality.

If colors are not accurate in a bad way like the early Sony cameras, then people are turned off. If colors are not accurate but they do match our emotional memory of the event like Kodachrome, then people love the look. I think that's probably true of the old cameras you mentioned.

Cameras like the Fuji S5 pro had old film engineers working on the "look" of the digital files so they looked pleasing while not totally accurate. Now companies are focused on accuracy for the sake of accuracy, stupidly high ISOs and 50MP of sharpness...