ELi5: Why is that when you photograph a television or phone screen, the picture shows squiggly lines all over the screen?

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This “lines” aren’t really visible when you’re just looking at a screen. I’m not sure if this has something to do with the resolution of the screen, or perhaps even quality of camera, but I’ve taken pictures of multiple TV screens while they were on. Each came out with some kind of distortion.

In: Technology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The sensors in the human eye (rods and cones) do not form a grid. Nor do we actually just capture a single image but instead the brain tapes together a bunch of pictures into one persistent one. A camera uses a grid of sensors to capture a single still image. Now the grid is almost always going to be a different size that that of the grid on the screen so what happens is similar to when you look through one window screen to another or two different chain link fences at the same time.

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