Better plasma screenshots

February 2, 2007 8:30 AM

Help me take better screenshots on my plasma. I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01, and probably my settings are bad. Screenshots are either too noisy (at high ISO ratings) or blurry (100 ISO). Exposure is often whack. I see great screenshots online, taken on big LCD or plasma. How do they do that? Thanks!
posted by PenguinBukkake to technology (10 comments total)

Photoshop, probably.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:42 AM on February 2, 2007

Are these being taken handheld or on a tripod?
posted by disarray at 8:44 AM on February 2, 2007

Lock your exposure while the camera is pointed at a pair of faded jeans near the TV. Hold really still.
posted by notsnot at 8:48 AM on February 2, 2007

One thing you have to do is take a long enough exposure to allow the screen to fully refresh. Try 1/60 or 1/30 second. More about pics of plasma screens is here.
posted by TedW at 8:52 AM on February 2, 2007

Balance your ISO as much as you can, stay at around 800 indoors, lower outdoors, for the least grain. You can probably hand-hold that camera at around 1/60 or 1/40, but whenever you can, rest the camera on something so that you can shoot at "lower" ISOs.
posted by tmcw at 9:32 AM on February 2, 2007

Handheld, but I've tried a tripod and they don't look much better!
posted by PenguinBukkake at 9:47 AM on February 2, 2007

Exposure can be fixed with a trick --- you can use a gray card, or fake one out (it won't be perfect, but for when 'good enough' is good enough, it's fine -- see flickr for an example I just uploaded.)

Print it out on the whitest paper you have, hold it against the screen and half-press the camera. This'll take a focus lock AND an exposure lock. Now, remove the paper and finish pressing the shutter release. As an extra bonus it'll give you a colour temperature lock, but whether or not that matches the image being displayed behind is another matter.

Blurriness is caused by either bad focus (the printout has good contrast areas to help autofocus), camera movement (use a tripod) or subject movement (the tv isn't going to move; but if the subject displayed moves you're left with boosting ISO to shorter shutter speed). If you can identity WHY it's blurry that's halfway to fixing it.

The FX-01 doesn't really have a lot of setting overrides - your best bet is to keep it as stable as you can (tripod if possible), make sure digital zoom is disabled, shoot in the highest resolution and quality, trick it where you can (see above for focus/exposure), and then ... load into photoshop to fix everything else.
posted by devbrain at 9:55 AM on February 2, 2007

For blurriness, use manual focus if you can. I've had autofocus get confused by glass surfaces, probably the AF beam reflects off since it's just IR.
posted by todbot at 11:13 AM on February 2, 2007

For reference, I've read that the Panasonic Lumix cameras of recent vintage have a lot of auto-stabilization that really amounts to an automatic amount of blur. You might be slightly hobbled by the fact that your camera is made to correct something that doesn't need correcting.
posted by mikeh at 11:43 AM on February 2, 2007

Not sure how you can make it better but I'm pretty sure the pros use cameras synced to the vertical blanking signal so they capture only one complete frame.
posted by chairface at 12:30 PM on February 2, 2007