I don't know much about photography, but AFAIK, modern cameras need contrast to calibrate themselves, not lightness (or darkness). Point the camera towards a dark corner, nothing. Point it towards the sun, nothing. Point it towards a sharp edge of a shadow, or any other high-contrast area, an voila, focus!
This might not be a problem in a brightly lit scene, as long as you are using manual white balance (or, well, shooting RAW so you can adjust all that shit after the fact), but as you go to darker locations, you can definitely have an issue.
A possible solution to this would be using infrared depth sensing rather than contrast or phase detection or a laser rangefinding system for autofocusing.
Cameras use lightness/color for auto exposure (and auto white-balance). If you shoot a picture of a white sheet of paper with auto exposure on, cameras will typically try to adjust exposure so that it comes out looking gray-ish.
You might need to overexpose the rest of the frame, so that the skintone darks are bright enough to be interesting. That's doable, but it takes either a human touch or a digital camera with facial-recognition technology to figure out that's what's happening instead of just going for the bright zones. (And then you get a bright white blob if there's a white guy in the frame.)
Bokay.
My camera apparently has the opposite problem. I can't autofocus on anything that's solid white. Did I accidentally buy the "black" model?
What about the guys at Fuji film? Is their film anti-white and Asian biased?
This whole discussion is absurd. Next thing we'll hear is that swimming pools are racist.
Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the
company didn’t develop a better film for rendering
different gradations of brown until economic pressure
came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional
accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate
confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s
ability to render the difference between chocolates of
different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture
manufacturers were complaining that stains and wood
grains in their advertisement photos were not true to life.”
Please don't express disagreement this way on Hacker News, regardless of how strongly you disagree.
Um. For a long time they were. Public pools were subject to racial segregation.
Glad we have an expert on racism like yourself to help set us all straight here!
Besides, where's the "racism" in the dominant financial caste optimizing a given piece of tech to their best interests? It's a commercial product, so you optimize it for your main market, which, for most of photography's life has been white.
A textbook example of racism is: "These people are inferior/primitive/stupid/immoral because they are black" (from which the colloraries come, like: "Lets exploit these infrerior people for slave labor". Or "I don't want these inferior people in my restaurant.)
This case is, on the other hand: "Black people in the US don't have us much income (a fact), and are much fewer than white people (another fact). We should better optimize our film for the most common buyer, which would be white people".
This has nothing to do with racism, it's basic economics. In fact if blacks were the most affluent or populous group, the same companies would target THEM in a heartbeat.