In August 2025, 9NEWS visited Imatest’s image quality lab in Boulder for Next with Kyle Clark, in a segment on how consumer cameras can reproduce some skin tones less faithfully than others. The bias is not new: it goes back to film photography, which was tuned for lighter skin, and it has carried over into digital cameras.
Imaging scientist Meg Borek walked through the skin tone study she is leading at Imatest, which photographs skin tones across the Monk Skin Tone Scale with a range of consumer cameras and under different lighting, to measure how accurately each camera renders them. The stakes go beyond phone photos and webcam calls: security cameras and medical imaging also depend on representing skin tones correctly.
