I very rarely take an actual photo of my own laptop screen but whenever I’ve been out and needed information with no quick way to store it, I’ve resorted to using my phone to take photos. Why does it look super pixelated?
In: Technology
Hi 🙂
Two things that can add weird patterns and may look like it’s pixelated:
One is the **Moiré pattern**. You’ve probably seen it when someone on TV is wearing a shirt with small stripes or squares, and it looks awful.
It’s when the pixel grid of your camera chip doesn’t quite match up with the thing you’re taking images of. You get new, weird repeating patterns:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Moir%C3%A92.png
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Moire2grd.png (Edit: If you have transparencies to print on, it’s fun to print different patterns like circles and such for this effect)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moir%C3%A9_pattern.png
It’s not really pixelated, just a pattern on-top of the two mismatching grids, so to speak.
LCD screens have a **polarization layer**. Simplified, light can have different wave directions. Your screen used liquid crystals for each pixel, that twists the background-light in different direction when electricity is applied. To make that visible, you need to filter all other light directions.
This can be picked up by cameras in odd ways. Usually you get darker and brighter areas, sometimes some rainbow colors and patterns (also, see above). Newer screens use different polarization layers to reduce this effect.
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