[Al Skierkiewicz]

Different types of light produce different amounts of color. Your eye/brain doesn't see the changes unless you have been trained to see them. A camera pickup device is based roughly on the human response to color and as such only about 11 % of the overall video is a blue signal. As such, most designers will try to normalize the gains on all stages and the blue signal will need about 6 times the gain of the green channel and three time the gain of the red channel just to get the signals the same level. Gain comes at a cost and that is an increase in noise, both thermal noise introduced at the pickup and electrical noise from the added gain stage. Bandwidth limiting can correct some of the noise in later stages and the encoder (where the colors are added into a composite color signal) can eliminate some more but blue will produce more noise than the other two colors. Please remember that fluorescent lighting produces two colors, one when the lamp is "on" and a different one when on the lamp is "off" occuring at 120 Hz. Your eye intergrates this strobe action above about 20 frames per second so you only see one color, the camera sees both. The best bet is to force a white balance with the light provided. Additionally, objects will reflect differing amounts of color depending on surface texture, dirt and the angle of incident light.