Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? When I take a photo of my Samsung Q-series television with my iPhone 16 Pro, I get the black smudgy line seen in the attached photo. I don’t remember this happening before. It’s not something on the lens. Regular photos are fine. And it doesn’t appear on videos of the television. Just photos.
I assume the TV has a diagonal screen refresh that is not detected by your eyes because it is fast, but is noticeable with the quick shutter of a camera. A longer exposure may help, but you may not have that level of control with the iPhone.
2 Likes
NOT a fix, but try faster/ slower shutter speeds and/or different ISO settings.
And does the line show in the same place with different types of shows (like live sports vs a filmed/ taped sitcom)?
I suspected it had something to do with scanning or refresh. The absence on videos puzzles me, but that’s just my lack of technical expertise.
This confirms it: It appears in different places, sometimes it looks like a smear, in this photo it is more “defined” as a line. I just took a photo of a news program, and I get two diagonal lines, same direction as the one in this photo. So it’s some timing issue between the iPhone camera and the television refresh rate (like helicopter blades appearing to not be moving in iPhone videos).
Thanks for the replies.
Diagonal refresh would be really weird.
I’m guessing that the TV’s refresh is top-to-bottom, synchronizing with a standard video signal and the phone has a rolling shutter, which is scanning from right-to-left (possibly because the phone is being held at a 90-degree rotation compared with the sensor’s native orientation). The two together combine to show a diagonal region.
As others have said, you should see if you can change the frame rate or increase the exposure time, if it is possible.
It might also be interesting to rotate the phone 90 degrees counterclockwise (relative to how you took the original picture), so that its rolling shutter is scanning in the same direction as the TV’s refresh. That should make the line horizontal. If the phone and TV have the same scan/refresh rates, you might not see any line (e.g. if the phone’s scanning is always reading a lit portion of the screen) or you might see everything go dark (e.g. if the phone’s scanning is always reading the unlit portion of the screen).
2 Likes
Aha! When the iPhone is in portrait mode (as it was in the photo I uploaded) I get the diagonal line(s). In landscape mode (as it should be, for taking a photo of the television, I was just lazy), the smudge line is not there.
I rarely take photos of the television. But I often take videos (capturing data for my research project). I guess that’s why I never noticed this.
The correct answer. I didn’t realize the iPhone had a rolling shutter effect to its sensor, but that makes more sense.