Eric Stevens wrote:

control colour balance and that the F801s could only control exposure.
It did this on the basis of a data base of thousands of images. It
must have had color sensitivity of some kind as, for example, it could
tell the difference between a large white-walled building and a snow
scene.

So you're basically saying that there's no way to detect the
difference between a large white-walled building and a snow
scene without colour sensitivity, not even by seeing that the
snow scene was much brighter than the building?

-Wolfgang