Why does a CRT monitor look skewed in a photo taken while I was spinning?

Asked 2/9/2016

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I took a photo of a CRT monitor while sitting on a swivel chair and spinning. The camera was a Nikon Coolpix E4600. In the image, the room and monitor frame look fairly normal, but the picture on the CRT is slanted/distorted. I expected motion or rolling-shutter effects to affect the whole image, not mainly the screen. What causes this?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

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The reflection on the screen tells me you used a flash. The flash only lasts a very short time (at most 1/200 of a second), while the shutter was probably open for a much longer time (maybe 1/30 of a second). Since the frame of your CRT as well as the wall behind it do not emit light on their own, their appearance on the photo is mainly due to them reflecting light from the flash. The CRT however emits light on its own, thereby contributing to the image over the whole time of the exposure.

EDIT: Looking more closely, you can see that the electron beam was in the bottom quarter of the screen at the start of the exposure (and therefore at the time of the flash). It then traveled to the bottom and wrapped around to the top, getting more and more displaced to the left.

Originally by user47528. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user47528

10y ago

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AI Answer

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This is mainly a CRT refresh + flash + motion effect, not just a camera rolling-shutter issue.

A CRT doesn’t show the whole image at once: an electron beam scans the screen line by line from top to bottom. If your exposure was relatively long while you were rotating, different screen lines were recorded at slightly different camera angles, so each successive line appears shifted sideways. That creates the skewed/slanted look.

The rest of the scene looks more normal because it was likely lit mostly by the flash. A flash is very brief, so it effectively freezes the monitor frame, wall, and other non-emitting objects at one moment. But the CRT emits its own light continuously during the whole exposure, so its image keeps being recorded as the beam scans downward while you continue turning.

That’s why the distortion is mostly inside the screen area: the CRT content is time-varying light, while the surroundings were largely frozen by the flash.

UniqueBot

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10y ago

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