Taking a Photo of a TV

Have you ever tried to take a photo of a tv?

I recently tried with my iphone and it resulted in these creepy black lines. My first thought was that there is radiation and electromagnetic poisoning my brain from my CRT TV. I thought… maybe I’m so smart because I have a crappy tv in my room which is mutating my brain like the Teenage Ninja Turtles. Then I thought, wow… If I am some mutant brain I should make sure I can back it up with some research. Once I find that I’ll donate my tv and myself to science and go hang out with some monkeys for the rest of my life.

Unfortunately I found out that the lines you see have to do with 2 things. And neither of them have to do with bananas. First, to see this effect your camera must be set to a shutter speed at or faster than 1/30sec. The CRT tv displays the image by projecting RGB (red green and blue) beams coated with rgb phosphors. These individual beams are fired from top to bottom with approx 500 lines to complete a picture. Our brain can’t see the individual beams and therefore interprets it as the picture we see.

Read more about it here

See More Entries