You might have never cared, but it seems to me you should have, at least
a little.  Shooting indoors with daylight film or outdoors with tungsten
is definitely a recipe for very bad color.  But I'm guessing what
happened was, you shot mostly using daylight film as you generally have
to go out of your way to get tungsten.  Shooting outdoors, then, you got
good results.  Shooting indoors under incandescent lighting, you also
left enough automatic settings happening that you pretty much always
ended up using flash, which made the lighting close enough in color to
daylight.  So the only time you got poor results were if you
accidentally bought tungsten film or if you shot indoors in a situation
where there was enough incandescent light to not need flash, neither of
which probably happened all that often.  So only a few of your shots
would have been improvsed much by being aware of these issues.

The discrepancies that occur from incorrect white balance settings can
be pretty bad.  It would more than outweigh any other tradeoffs between
digitals.  That is, a $100 camera with correct WB will arguably take a
better looking picture than a $1000 camera on the wrong WB setting.  So
it would be foolish not to think about white balance to some degree if
one is considering spending $1000 on a camera.  Fortunately, the auto
setting *does* often produce decent results on many cameras in many
situations, so you don't have to think about it *all* that often to get
results as good as you happened to get in film.

--------------
Marc Sabatella
marc@outsideshore.com

The Outside Shore
Music, art, & educational materials:
http://www.outsideshore.com/

And what I meant was that auto-white balance (or auto-anything) has its
caveats, and if you're not aware of them....  Well, I guess ignorance
can be bliss. ;-)

Actually, "...in the ol' film days..." there was no such thing a "white
balance."  Photographers referred to the color temperature of light and
used a color temperature meter (or acutal film tests) to determine it and
what, if any, light balancing (LB) or color correction (CC) filters to
apply to "balance" the light to match the color temperature rating of the
film. Otherwise, there would be a "color shift."  Sometimes, this shift
was unwanted; other times desired. And sometimes, the photographer would
"generate" a color shift from the true balance by using filters just for
effect.

The term "white balance" comes from modern digital video, because it
involved using a special, calibrated white card to color balance the
camera.  Videographers would aim their camera at the card, filling the
frame, and push the "auto-white balance" button.  All done! (In the good
ol' days before digital video cameras and auto-white balance, the color
balancing process was much more involved, took great skill and required
the operator to have excellent color vision.  A special target of various
graduated grey and color scales, primary and secondary colors, and
critical, "contrast" greytones was used.)

However, auto-white balance, as it applies to digital still cameras, is
more a bastard step-child of video's white balance, since the balancing is
based on reading light reflected off numerous items of various colors in
a scene, and not a calibrated white card. Further, to make it "work",
various assumptions about the scene being photographed must be made, which
can introduce errors, just as reflected light metering is prone to errors
in determining the "correct" exposure.  However, if all you're doing is
taking snapshots under daylight conditions, these errors are of no
consequence, but if your work is more critical or you are just bothered by
out of color balance shots, then auto-white balance is not an option.  You
need either to use "custom white balance," which requires a calibrated
white card just like video, or you use the preset color settings or, with
some cameras, actually setting the color temperature to balance to.

For convenience, with digital, I just use the presets just like I did
for years with film -- daylight for predominately "daylight" light,
tungsten for glowing filament light sources, etc. -- even though I
have a color meter, and could set the camera exactly.  The only difference
today is when I shoot digital I don't use LB or CC filters, I just tweak
the balance in post. The exception being when I'm shooting architectural
work with both film and digital. The digital shots gets the same
filtration added on camera as the film camera to maintain continuity.

In any case, auto-white balance can and, I've found, about half the
time does, give you various color balances of each shot when multiple
shots of different compositions of the same scene are taken even under the
same lighting conditions within seconds of one another.  It shouldn't.  If
the light doesn't change, the color balance shouldn't either.  This little
annoyance is one of many reasons that has made me give up permanently on
auto-white balance. It's more trouble than it's worth.

Stefan