> 1) technical limitations - even high end color printers today, have problems with reproducing various shades of brown, which is what almost all Black people in the USA at least, are (there are a few people with very dark skin which is more truly black).
I am not a color scientist, but I am a photo- and videographer and have done print design and I've had reason to stare into video codecs in the past, so while I'm not an expert and would not claim to be one, I have some familiarity with digital and paper color reproduction.
You are, to be 100% clear, correct about this in the current state of the world. But it's also quite easy for this to be a just-so story: printers are bad at this, sure, but I'm aware of no reason that they have to be.
Analogies are always suspect, but consider: 15-bit RGB color is noticeably less able to articulate perceptual green gradients, which is why a common color format is thus 565--that's optimizing for human biology. We sell monitors to humans, not to dogs. Now, take it back to film and to paper: is a roll of film or a printer dealing with hard limits of physics or biology, or just optimizing for the assumption that the people guiding the research, specifying product output, and (for a long time) buying that output...had lighter skin?
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It can just be the local maximum of capitalism.txt leading to worse global outcomes.
I think it is that on monitors we use RGB and on paper, if printing, we use CMYK colors; so there is a problem just going from on-screen to print in some cases. And brown is a tertiary color:
"In a RGB color space (made from three colored lights for red, green, and blue), hex #964B00 is made of 58.8% red, 29.4% green and 0% blue. In a CMYK color space (also known as process color, or four color, and used in color printing), hex #964B00 is made of 0% cyan, 50% magenta, 100% yellow and 41% black. Brown has a hue angle of 30 degrees, a saturation of 100% and a lightness of 29.4%." (of course different browns will vary)
Since the mixing requires magenta, yellow and black, it is just that much more difficult to get it exactly correct.
If the world had used something other than CMYK, perhaps it would be easier - but it would likely still be a tertiary color which requires very careful quality control; and as you no doubt remember, early color printers suffered from "metamerism" where the perceived color/intensity would vary depending on the angle of the light hitting the ink on the paper, or the angle at which the paper was viewed.
Brown is a "fake" color, in both additive and subtractive realms, indistinguishable from dark orange without contextual clues. Or one could be funny and say that orange is really "bright brown", either way.
I am not a color scientist, but I am a photo- and videographer and have done print design and I've had reason to stare into video codecs in the past, so while I'm not an expert and would not claim to be one, I have some familiarity with digital and paper color reproduction.
You are, to be 100% clear, correct about this in the current state of the world. But it's also quite easy for this to be a just-so story: printers are bad at this, sure, but I'm aware of no reason that they have to be.
Analogies are always suspect, but consider: 15-bit RGB color is noticeably less able to articulate perceptual green gradients, which is why a common color format is thus 565--that's optimizing for human biology. We sell monitors to humans, not to dogs. Now, take it back to film and to paper: is a roll of film or a printer dealing with hard limits of physics or biology, or just optimizing for the assumption that the people guiding the research, specifying product output, and (for a long time) buying that output...had lighter skin?
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy. It can just be the local maximum of capitalism.txt leading to worse global outcomes.