Shooting Computer Screens

For NTSC television systems (North America and some other countries), the easiest way would be to use a broadcast camera with ClearScan (Sony), Synchro-Scan (Panasonic) or equivilent technology. That technology allows the camera's shutter to precisely match the refresh rate of the computer monitor. Otherwise, try to find an LCD monitor that can be used as a TV. LCDs do not "refresh" like regular CRT "tubes" do (scanning lines).

The cheapest workaround would be to set the computer monitor's refresh rate to 60Hz (then apologize to the poor soul who has to stare at it!), set the camera's shutter at 1/60th, and hope for the best. If all works well, you get a perfect solid picture. Otherwise, you usually get a faint slow rolling bar going down the TV screen. However, it is not as distracting as a flickering screen!

Of course, one way to avoid all that trouble is to use an LCD display.

Once you have flicker gone, you'll have to deal with colour temperature. Most computer screens, be it CRT or LCD, are set to a white point of 9300ºK ... in an indoor (tungsten) environment of 3200ºK. Some monitors allow you to set the white point to a lower Kelvin, and some operating systems like Mac OS X allow you to adjust the white point in the System Preferences. Go into Display, click on the Color tab and click the Calibrate button.