That was the case in 2005, but now nearly every camera in public and industrial use supports color except save some in particular logistics uses that would need upgrading. The only reason it remains is legacy and convention. Yes, it requires different printers, but that's not an insurmountable supply chain change, especially if it's reduced to a few distinct colors that don't need to be mixed. This is a missed opportunity to encode more data into a given area and/or to make it more readable.
> nearly every camera in public and industrial use supports color
This is essentially false. Plenty of industrial cameras are black and white because of their speed and light collecting advantages. This matters for high speed identification. Going to color would not be an upgrade.
"missed opportunity"
Limited information density just isn't nearly as big an issue as you seem to believe.
Colors work great until they don't, for non emissive sources they depend on ambient lighting. A black and white code can be read with under virtually any color lighting (it doesn't even have to be in the visible spectrum). And if you've seen anyone futzing getting a read of an eticket off an emissive device such as a screen, that is just much worse once color is brought in.
Most auto ID applications have limited keys and identifiers encoded in the symbol.
Just as color cameras are ubiquitous, the same goes for network connectivity, you don't need to store massive amounts of data in the symbol. If color symbols were really that much of a win they would have been adopted in industry. Attempts by groups that don't understand the subject have been made over the years, this is not new:
This is quite an understatement. There's no cheap upgrade path from monochrome thermal printing technology (or laser engraving), that's why they have never been replaced all these years.
Color imagers were readily available long before 2005. Color printing has not changed much at all in the past 20 years. If color symbols made sense they would have been adopted a long time ago. They are almost always the wrong approach, too many problems for too little payoff, that's why they are uncommon.
