In this paper we present a colorimetric characterization method for digital color cameras, based on hue plane and white point preservation. The present implementation of the method incorporates a series of 3 by 3 matrices, each responsible for the transformation of a subset of camera RGB-values to colorimetric XYZ-values. The method is compared to a choice of three other common characterization methods based on least squares fitting. These other methods are an unconstrained 3 by 3 matrix, a white point preserving 3 by 3 matrix and a second order polynomial.The methods have been evaluated on real camera signals coming from an Imacon Ixpress professional digital CCD camera, under flash light. The Gretag MacBeth Color Checker and the Color Checker DC charts have been used as test set and training set (respectively). The method is evaluated in combination with a noise susceptibility estimation of the training set samples and a preliminary subdivision of the hue domain, that reduces the amount of test samples needed in the characterization. The noise estimation is based on a geometric analysis in camera chromaticity space.