Why does a picture of a LED/LCD screen appear super pixelated and distorted, but when you zoom in, much of the distortion goes away?

Question

I wish I could attach pictures to show what I mean, but I’ll paste an imgur link that shows what I mean because it’s hard to explain. When taking a photo of an LCD/LED screen, like a computer or television, its super pixelated and distorted. However, if you zoom in on the same image, while still pixelated, a lot of the pixelization goes away. Here’s an imgur link with two pictures: [https://imgur.com/a/fWMBJ8x](https://imgur.com/a/fWMBJ8x) It’s kind of hard to tell from the pictures, but maybe y’all will know what I’m talking about.

In: 64

Answer 1

Moirés patterns. The pixels in the camera aren’t aligned with the pixels on the screen, so each pixel of the image is centered on a slightly different part of the screen pixels. When zoomed out, this causes the resulting image to be a mismatched collection of parts of screen pixels. This random assortment can’t be blended together by our eyes. Zooming in produces a more accurate picture of the screen.