Posted on 01/22/2010 7:27:15 AM PST by raybbr
When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.
Wang, a Taiwanese-American strategy consultant who goes by the Web handle "jozjozjoz," thought it was funny that the camera had difficulties figuring out when her family had their eyes open. So she posted a photo of the blink warning on her blog under the title, "Racist Camera! No, I did not blink... I'm just Asian!" The post was picked up by Gizmodo and Boing Boing, and prompted at least one commenter to note, "You would think that Nikon, being a Japanese company, would have designed this with Asian eyes in mind." (See Techland's top 10 gadgets of 2009.)
Nikon isn't the only big brand whose consumer cameras have displayed an occasional - though clearly unintentional - bias toward Caucasian faces. Face detection, which is one of the latest "intelligent" technologies to trickle down to consumer cameras, is supposed to make photography more convenient. Some cameras with face detection are designed to warn you when someone blinks; others are programmed to automatically take a picture when somebody smiles - a feature that, theoretically, makes the whole problem of timing your shot to catch the brief glimpse of a grin obsolete. Face detection has also found its way into computer webcams, where it can track a person's face during a video conference or enable face-recognition software to prevent unauthorized access.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Digital racism alert.
I do believe someone is confused about eye shapes here.
1110010111001110001111
Binary is racist!!!!
It's the law.
Why don’t they get a life?
I have that particular camera, I get that message all the time, and I’m not Asian and most of the people I’m photographing aren’t, either.
This will greatly simplify computer logic as no logical operations or tests will be required or allowed. - Just like government.
I’ve given up on our camera’s “smile” option. It works occasionally, but the chances of my family all smiling at once for a picture are pretty much nill. :-)
If the camera refuses to photograph people of color, then it's racist.
Lulz....O_O
Did somebody get hit with an ugly stick?
Isn’t that the truth?
Those who speak binary, and those who don't.
Binary is racist!!!!
President Obama demands that 0.5 be included. (or is that joke pushing the line on good taste?)
HP Webcam is racist...see it in action, here http://viralfootage.com/?p=4740
Naw, them idjuts jus don kno how to oprate there camra.
They’s jus forgot to ajust the beady-eye setten.
That's funny. He used the word negro. I bet he gets his butt kicked by the Black Panthers.
Yeah, just try to get a picture of my wife with her eyes open. I dare you.
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