Re: the color Purple
I think blues and purples are at the edges of the gamut that s-RGB is supposed to render, and only a little inside the a-RGB space. And if you are viewing a jpg in a browser, your onscreen impression is very hard to predict. I took two test shots tonight in difficult conditions. We don't have anything flowering with the right colors so I grabbed a grey-blue-lavender polypropylene sweater, a purple sponge, some orange and red fruit, a bright red cactus and a reddish purple box of Kleenex, shot it under dimmed halogen illumination, of about 2000 - 2500K. I figured this would give any camera indigestion.
The first shot, with an M8, 35mm shot at f/2.8, ISO 160 (UV/IR filter and lens detection ON) came up with an "as shot" color temperature of 2940K and shift of -2 (toward the green). Clicking on the WhiBal card brought that down to 2530K and -1. This is typical of the M8, since the new AWB firmware strenuously resists going below 3000K. The engineers felt that if you take pictures by candlelight, you want to get a warm overall coloration.
The second shot, with a GRD-II, came up in C1-4.01 with 2450K +11 (C1's profile for this camera is a real generic neutral translation, without camera-specific tuning), and click-balanced to 2215K +12. ISO 100, f/2.8.
The results (the M8 shot is pretty accurate, the GRD-II is way off to the blue):