We investigated how well a multilayer neural network could implement the mapping between two trichromatic color spaces, specifically from camera R,G,B to tristimulus X,Y,Z. For training the network, a set of 800,000 synthetic reflectance spectra was generated. For testing the network, a set of 8,714 real reflectance spectra was collated from instrumental measurements on textiles, paints and natural materials. Various network architectures were tested, with both linear and sigmoidal activations. Results show that over 85% of all test samples had color errors of less than 1.0 ΔE₂₀₀₀ units, much more accurate than could be achieved by regression.