Color TV Screen Shots

[ohohyodafarted]

I have been perplexed with the problem of getting nice looking screen shots for some time now.

I have discovered that it appears that the camera is too sensitive to the fine detail of the picture. It seems that the human eye has a way of smoothing the imperfections of the fine detail in a tv picture. Perhaps this is due to the human eye having "persistence of vision" (just my guess)

What ever the reason, my screen shots have been, in my opinion, un-acceptable to me ever since I started taking screen shots. Over the years I have tried a number of techniques to try and get a smooth looking picture without sacrificing lots of detail. I think I finally found something that seems to work for me.

Here is what I am now doing, and maybe it will work for you:
set your digital camera so that it takes a picture of at least 1600 x1200 pixels. Mount your camera on a tripod. Using shutter priority mode take an exposure of at least 1 second without a flash. Use as wide an angle with your zoom as possible and move the tripod to a position that takes the full screen plus about another 50% (IE: the frame consists about 2/3 CRT and 1/3 surounding area). Using a DVD player or digital set top box place the source in pause mode for the frame of video you wish to capture.

The long 1 second exposure will have a tendency to "blend" or "smooth" the image on the screen as the TV set refreshes the image at 30 frames/second.

Now that you have a half way decent image in your digital camera, transfer it to your computer.

For the following step I use a program called "IrFanView" This program has a very nice facility for batch re-sizing digital images. Because I take my photos for the purpose of making web pages for my web site, I re-size to make the width of all my photos 800 pixels wide by what ever length they end up. It seems that the act of downsizing from 1600 to 1200 pixels wide has an additional benefit of further smoothing the photo to a point that when it is viewed on a web browser, thee photo doesn't show all the fine hash and imperfections that I was previously getting, and still the photo looks very nice. The overall intent is to have a photo that replicates what our eyes perceive, and I am more pleased with this method than anything I have tried previously. Smaller screens have always been more difficult to photograph due to the fact that the phosphor dots on a small screen are larger with respect to the image size being displayed. ON a large crt the image is composed of more dots, so the image looks smoother.

You may want to give this a try next time you are trying to show a screen shot of your color set. With a different camera you may not get the same results I have obtained.

I have attached two 800x600 screen shots off of my CT100 demonstrating the difference this method made for me.