China Girls, Color TV, And Racial Bias

June 30, 2015 11:30 AM

The Atlantic covers the fight over color TV, the women who helped push it, and how racial bias influenced the evolution of the technology. Of note is the history of bias influencing all sorts of imaging technologies, pushing towards fidelity of reproducing lighter skin tones at the expense of darker ones.
posted by NoxAeternum (9 comments total)

In my 1963 HS yearbook, photographs of dark-skinned Black students were clearly overexposed in the printing process to make them look lighter.
posted by Repack Rider at 12:05 PM on June 30, 2015

Here are two previous FPPs about (photography) film emulsion and skin tone bias, that get touched on in the article.
posted by halifix at 12:28 PM on June 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

In my 1963 HS yearbook, photographs of dark-skinned Black students were clearly overexposed in the printing process to make them look lighter.

In 1963, the printing processes for most high school yearbooks weren't exactly of the highest quality. The sad truth is, lightening dark-skinned people in photos is often necessary to avoid them appearing as large, black blobs in print. It's even worse when it's done as a batch process (i.e. lightening all images of black kids by 15%, or something like that), as they would for something like a yearbook, rather than on an individual basis.

See also: Dot gain.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:56 PM on June 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Google dev apologizes after Photos app tags black people as “gorillas”
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:08 PM on June 30, 2015

A bit more on that wacky CBS color system.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:13 PM on June 30, 2015

Those previous articles made it fairly clear that early colour film really didn’t have the dynamic range to faithfully represent both light & dark skins simultaneously. As a photographer / film maker you had the Hobson's choice of ending up with either far too dark black portraits or washed out white portraits, unless you compensated with spot lighting or multiple cameras with differing exposures.

Was it really possible for Kodak et al to make film with a wider dynamic range at the time?
posted by pharm at 1:19 PM on June 30, 2015

I'm looking at my HDTV and wondering what my life would look like if CBS's wacky mechanical scheme had triumphed.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:24 PM on June 30, 2015

I'm looking at my HDTV and wondering what my life would look like if CBS's wacky mechanical scheme had triumphed.

Mechanical tv wasn't exactly a new idea, though. It was, in fact, the dominant tv model in the early days of tv, until the early 30's in the US. The BBC continued mech-tv broadcasts until about 1935.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:15 PM on June 30, 2015

Mr. Encyclopedia: on the off-chance you have a DLP HDTV, you probably don't have to wonder too much. Most consumer-level "single-chip" DLP equipment uses a mechanical color wheel very similar to CBS's to produce images.

This CBS Color System chronology is quite interesting, but also provides a really lovely screen capture of what the image on a restored 1950 CBS receiver looks like. There are still a few -- very few! -- working receivers. Sadly, since all the old sources of CBS Color are long gone, they had to wait for a converter to be developed to be able to display video again.

If you'd like to see Patty Painter -- and her scarves! -- in living color, take a look.

Another bit of trivia: The logo of Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications has a certain similarity to CBS's logo for their ill-fated color system.
posted by orthicon halo at 5:24 PM on June 30, 2015