white balance adjustment methods, whats your favorite?

[afex]

i'm in the market for a digital SLR camera, and have been using www.dpreview.com to do some research.

i know that being able to adjust the WB is important due to our lighting, but i've seen a few different ways that cameras allow you to do so and am not sure which one works the best for our purposes.

for example: i've been comparing the Olympus C-8080 Wide Zoom to the upcoming Nikon D80 and they do WB two different ways

(note: they both do auto and presets like "cloudy", "flourescent", etc. this is discussing their unique features)

C-8080:
along with the available presets, you are able to fine tune them -7 to +7 and save up to four of these as custom presets.
D80:
able to fine tune the available presets, but only -3 to +3, but also has kelvin rated setting (2500K to 9900K)

when i saw the kelvin setting, i thought "perfect!" but was disappointed when i saw it only went up to 10K. (i use 14K+ lights)

does anybody have any experience with these cameras (or the like) and can comment on which method for WB adjustment would help me produce the best looking photographs?

thanks!

 

[Reef_bones]

Preset is where you actually sample the subject in the veiwer and set your white balance to it. Or it is on the d50. Cloudy, sunlight, flourescent are all preconfigured settings. I also have found that the kelvin doesn't directly carry over to what you find in our hobby. What I mean is at a Whitebalance set to about 10k it looks really yellow on the picture.

My method for shooting my tank is a real light baby blue towel drapped over the front of the tank, and I fill the veiwer with the towel and hold the button down in WB preset mode to set it to the shade of the towel..Then when I snap pictures they look in the picture exactly as they do looking at the tank...

OK I am not good at explaining things so someone else might be better at this...

 

[afex]

k i guess i got my terminology a little cofuddled. i'm new at this

ideally i'd like a camera where i can find the perfect WB setting once and save it on the camera for as long as i want, so when i want to take tank pictures i can just put it in "tank mode"

but i'd hate to get a camera, say, due to it having a particular WB setting method, and then find out that i cant get it exactly right. since i'm unfamiliar with how the different methods work, i have no clue which is easier to get a better match with.

 

[Blazer88]

I don't worry about the white balance, just shoot in RAW and adjust as necessary.

 

[astrogazer]

You're not going to be able to get the white balanced with 14k+, you can do the best you can, +/-7 is a lot, it might come close, but you're still better off shooting RAW and doing the balance after the shot as well as other pertinent post processing.