Datacolour LightColor Meter: Gear of the Year Awards 2026 winner
Posted on Nov 2, 2026 by Lily Smith
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You’ll be a believer in accurate white balance when you put your trust in Datacolor’s award-winning LightColor Meter.
If you always put your faith in your camera’s automatic white balance, you’ll quickly discover using several different light sources at once means your project is never quite as your envisioned it. That’s a particular problem for documentary and event filmmakers as there may be no opportunity to reposition lights or ask someone to repeat an important moment. Get the colour wrong and the only option is trying to fix it in post. The Datacolor LightColor Meter offers another approach by measuring what’s actually happening before you shoot.
Even controlled lighting isn’t necessarily as consistent as you might imagine. The fixtures can vary from their displayed colour temperature and two supposedly identical lights can differ from one another. Introduce modifiers on your lights, add in daylight, practical lighting and multiple cameras and judging everything by eye can become impossible.
A documentary shoot inside Germany’s Reichenau Abbey provided a perfect example. Camera positions were tightly controlled, while the church presented a cocktail of daylight through windows and coloured glass, cool overhead fixtures and warmer illumination around the chancel. Different positions produced noticeably different mixtures of light.
Simply putting cameras into automatic white balance wasn’t ideal. Different cameras can interpret a complex scene differently and the AWB may change during a shot. That’s inconvenient on a single camera and a major headache in a multi-camera production.
Instead, the crew used the LightColor Meter to measure each shooting position in advance, including the altar, chancel and lectern. The resulting colour temperature and white-balance values were recorded and attached to each tripod, allowing camera operators to select the appropriate predefined setting as positions changed.
And despite its name, the LightColor Meter isn’t only about colour temperature. Its measuring dome can analyse colour values as well as exposure, with measurements displayed through Datacolor’s dedicated mobile app. Customisable layouts allow relevant information to be presented clearly, while separating the measuring head from the display means lighting and camera crews can view results together while making adjustments.
Capturing accurate and consistent colour at source makes the entire workflow faster – a key reason why the LightColor Meter was voted a winner in the editing/workflow hardware category by readers of Pro Moviemaker in the annual Gear of the Year Awards. Because sometimes the quickest way to spend less time in post is to get it right before you press record.
More info at goto.datacolor.com/sp0445
