One great camera phone produces an image that's full of detail. Another great camera phone produces an image with similar detail but totally different colouring - but which is 'right'? In this postscript to my Camera Nitty Gritty series of features, I explain that 'right' is somewhat subjective and that what you see from a digital camera is always heavily influenced by what the manufacturer thinks you'll prefer to see.

"Ultimately, of course, the answer is that there's no absolute 'right', even at a scientific level - colours of 'reflected' light (as in a real world scene) are subjective by definition. You can hook up a spectrometer and then compare its output to a spectrogram from a captured photo of the same scene and (try to) pronounce 'accuracy' this way, but it turns out that digital camera always 'lie' to some extent."

Read on