JUST for the record, unless the Review is claiming to have moved the date of the earliest known colour photography back a few years, the photograph of Symond's Yat which appeared in last week's edition and dated as circa 1905 is a hand tinted version of a black and white print.

The earliest colour photographic process, the

Autochrome process in­vented by the Lumiére Brothers, in France, dated from 1907 but was not available in Britain until 1909.

However, the crudity of the process, which utilised glass plates, potato starch and boot black, produced extremely grainy pictures and the colours were poor. It was not until the 1930s that colour film of reasonable quality, such as Dufaycolor, became available and the resultant pictures still had a visible line process to them.

The quality displayed by the Symond's Yat photograph was not to be achieveable until the advent of colour prints in the 1950s. However, prior to all this, the Photochrom Company had made colour hand tinted photographs in to something of an art form from circa 1900, such that copies of their pictures are now widely available on the internet.

– Neil Parkhouse, Black?Dwarf Lightmoor Publications Ltd.