Can I identify the colour of objects 5mm in diamater with an EV3 Colour sensor? My plan was to make a simple robot to sort beads like this:. Its the Hama Medium size beads, they have a diameter of 5mm so they are fairly small. After some testing, reading and asking here I figured out that it would be impossible for me to get any color reading at all from objects that small with the default sensor setup (8 distinct colors).

Is there some trick I can use to get the sensor to see the beads and get at least some of the color?
You may try to use the color sensor in RGB mode using a 3rd party block found here: http://mindcuber.com/mindcub3r/mindcub3r.html#ColorSensorRGBBlock
With this block you get a set of three 0-255 values, one for each R G B color. It will still be tricky to correctly classify the color of your objects as the readings are noisy - you can try to set ranges to each RGB value with or w/o normalization - but at least you have some data to work with.