Color: lens or body ?

HappySnapper90 wrote in post #16458035
However I think the exposure is making more of a difference in the color than the color is being displayed differently. Exposure affects how colors are displayed!

I do not disagree, but exposure (certainly not the 1/2EV difference that we might be seeing, as evidenced by the ColorChecker black-thru-white patch renditions) cannot account for the very different saturation levels of the yellow feather! It must be recognized that identical postprocessing values in RAW conversion were used for all four shots...so fundamental differences do exist between cameras as recorded by the sensor and unaltered in the RAW data recording, and these are manifest in the differences seen with identical settings in LR. That is NOT to say that all four could not be made to look very very similar to each other, but that wasn't the point to be illustrated in my doing that comparison.

I disagree. As exposure increases, saturation decreases. This is what people said about "under exposing slide film to increase saturation" although the concept isn't valid. Under exposure leads to darker photos. People consider darker to be more saturated.

Wilt, I can't reproduce your results in the Hamilton portraits. The differences I see are far more subtle, but I can't reenact the comparison exactly because I have a 5D2, not a 5D. The fact that the WB probe produces exactly the same results (2600K/+2) would seem to indicate that whatever overall color cast there is due to the lighting is identical in both shots. But I also wondered how much Lightroom might be hiding camera differences - the profiles making compensations to "level the playing ground", so I opened the Raw files in Raw Digger, as seen below. The first and most obvious difference is the 1/2 stop difference in exposure, but I knew that already, no surprise there. What is more significant is that in LR5 there is only a 0.1 stop difference - LR's auto-adaptive exposure adjustments at work.
Looking more closely at the histograms there is evidence in the shape of the peaks of differences in the ways the cameras respond to the same colors. In the 40D the green peaks have their highest points on the right and it smoothly slopes off to the left and in the 5D2 it is the opposite but the slope is not smooth - high point on the right and smaller high point on the left. The differences in the red peaks are even more marked. So there are differences, but I think they are fairly subtle - although I am not expert enough in interpreting histograms to really know.

I see that your $20 shots were done just a year ago, but I wonder what version of LR you were using then, because I think that the earlier versions did a lot less to "homogenize" the rendering.

HappySnapper90 wrote in post #16458086
I disagree. As exposure increases, saturation decreases. This is what people said about "under exposing slide film to increase saturation" although the concept isn't valid. Under exposure leads to darker photos. People consider darker to be more saturated.

Will this convince you otherwise? The eyedropper values of box 11 of the greyscale from both shots is 22-22-22, and box 11 of the Kodak color chart is 33-33-33, for both shots from 60D and T31...same exposure. Same saturation values in both LR settings, and here is the side by side. Note the saturation of the colored feathers, visibly more saturated colors in the photo on the left from the 60D than in the photo on the right from the T3i. The Kodak logo is also more saturated on the left, than on the right.

tzalman wrote in post #16458262
I see that your $20 shots were done just a year ago, but I wonder what version of LR you were using then, because I think that the earlier versions did a lot less to "homogenize" the rendering.

Well, using LR3.5 and a grey card target, and two shots from each camera, using eyedropper sampling to render 55-55-55 values from all four...

40D WB=2805 Tint=+5
40D WB=2700 Tint=+2

5D WB=2700 Tint=+14
5D WB=2600 Tint=+10

So there seems to be, at least with these samples, evidence of more warmth and a bit more green tint in the 5D requiring higher magenta level for neutrality in the 5D.

Heh, fun stuff!

I think I'm fortunate that I didn't have a career in the "science of digital imaging"!

I posted the tests from my desktop PC, but looking at the same posts from my laptop, the laptop monitor is clearly inferior in the display of somewhat subtle differences...it makes them even yet more subtle! It proves to me why postprocessing on laptops -- without a good external monitor -- is somewhat of a wasted effort.