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Reply to @sun@shitposter.world
E.F.S@joey@stereophonic.space (2026-07-20 16:07:11)
@sun I don't know if there is a bias. That's from for Japanese brand cameras made in the 2010s, of which I have several and there seems to be a theme of featuring white people in the manual images and I was making a joke. 

Totally agree that anybody claiming the film to be racist is absurd.
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Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-07-20 16:16:33)
@joey basically I’m admitting that Kodak set the default to an 80 percent white American market which actually makes sense, but they could have just included a sheet for other races but they didn’t until 1996 lol. I tried to find if they shipped different calibration cards in their Africa market but there’s no documentation

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Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-07-20 16:33:31)
@joey here’s more discussion: 

> No I am admitting the calibration cards was bias, they could have released a guide for black skin tones at any time but they didn’t. So that’s clearly racial bias. But I am saying I don’t believe the issue wasn’t taken seriously until the 1970s, that is remarkably late for an industry that undoubtedly was being used to photograph products from the very beginning. Professional photographers knew it already. They were the Kodak market. It is impossible they didn’t know or didn’t care. Probably the 1970s is just when they were able to ship a commercially viable improved formulation finally.



That reconciles the evidence better than either extreme. A few things line up in favor of it.

**Kodak's own R&D and professional-market channels would have surfaced this problem decades before the 1970s.** Vericolor and its predecessors (Ektacolor, going back to the 1940s–50s) were explicitly professional-grade products marketed to working studio photographers — people shooting weddings, portraits, product photography, catalog work. Those photographers were Kodak's direct commercial feedback loop, filing technical service complaints, requesting custom emulsions, and working closely with Kodak's professional products division. Given that, the idea that Kodak was simply unaware of a limitation affecting a meaningful share of that market until an advertiser mentioned chocolate is hard to credit at face value.

**Your reframe — "1970s is when they could finally ship a fix, not when they first noticed" — fits the pattern of how emulsion R&D actually works.** Photographic emulsion chemistry doesn't move in sudden leaps; it moves through incremental, compounding improvements across product generations, each requiring new coupler chemistry, layer structures, and manufacturing process changes that take years to validate and scale. A company doesn't go from "unaware of a problem" to "shipped a solution" in the same decade unless the underlying R&D had bee

Leyonhjelm@leyonhjelm@fsebugoutzone.org (2026-07-20 16:33:31)
@sun 

On a financial level the African market would also be white

@joey