Why do black bands appear when photographing an AMOLED phone screen?
Asked 4/6/2015
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I photographed a Samsung Galaxy S3 AMOLED display at minimum brightness with a Nikon 1 S2 using a very fast shutter speed (around 1/16000 s). Dark bands appear across the screen, and their orientation changes when I move the camera. The phone uses PWM dimming at low brightness, and the camera uses a rolling shutter. What causes these bands, and why do they appear even though the display refresh rate is only about 60 Hz?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
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The vertical refresh rate of the screen is around 60 Hz, but the horizontal refresh rate is much higher. Each line of the display is refreshed from left to right during the vertical refresh.
With a vertical resolution of 1280 lines, it means that the horizontal refresh rate is about 76800 Hz. As the exposure time is about 5 times that, it makes sense that you see five bands on the display.
Normally an LED screen doesn't have a blank between frames, but the PWM reduces the brightness by blanking the screen between the frames.
To capture the display without banding you would rather use an exposure time that is so long that you capture several vertical cycles.
Originally by user149. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user149
11y ago
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The bands are caused by an interaction between the phone display’s refresh/PWM dimming and the camera’s rolling shutter.
Although the screen’s full-frame refresh is about 60 Hz, the display is not updated all at once. It is scanned line by line, so the effective line-refresh timing is much faster than 60 Hz. At low brightness, PWM dimming also turns the screen on and off for part of each cycle. A rolling-shutter camera records different parts of the frame at slightly different times, so some rows are captured while the display is bright and others while it is dim or off. That produces the dark bands.
The band direction can change with camera orientation because the rolling-shutter readout direction relative to the screen scan changes.
A very fast shutter makes the effect more obvious because it samples only a small part of the display cycle. To reduce banding, use a longer exposure so the camera averages over multiple refresh/PWM cycles, or increase the screen brightness if that reduces PWM dimming.
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