Sony Patents a System That Spots Visual Glitches When Cameras Film Screens
Anyone who has ever pointed a camera at a TV or monitor knows the result: strange banding, flickering, or moiré patterns that look terrible on playback. Sony has filed a patent for a system that could predict those glitches before the camera even starts rolling.
What Sony's screen-artifact detector actually does
When you film a screen with a camera, the camera's sensor and the screen's pixel grid don't always line up cleanly. That mismatch creates visual noise called artifacts, things like shimmering patterns or rolling bands, that can ruin footage even when everything looks fine to the human eye.
Sony wants to build a tool that figures out in advance whether a given camera-and-display pairing will produce these glitches. It would crunch details about both the screen and the camera: how far apart the screen's light-up dots are, how fine the camera's sensor is, what kind of blur filter the camera uses, and how far away the two devices are from each other.
Sony's run of camera-quality filings The goal is a clear yes or no answer: will this setup cause artifacts? That could help camera operators, broadcasters, and video professionals pick the right gear or adjust their position before a single frame is captured.
… determining whether or not an artifact occurs in a captured video of a camera by using an interval between light emitting elements of a display, a pixel interval between image sensors of the camera …
Translation: The system calculates when visual glitches will appear by comparing the pixel grid of the screen with the sensor grid of the camera.
How the system calculates when a glitch will appear
The patent describes an information processing device with a single core job: run a calculation that predicts whether visual artifacts will appear when a camera records a display.
To make that prediction, the system takes in several inputs from both sides of the equation:
- Display side: the physical spacing between the screen's individual light-emitting elements (the tiny dots that make up the image).
- Camera side: the pixel spacing of the image sensor, the characteristics of the camera's optical low-pass filter (a component that deliberately blurs the image slightly to reduce exactly this kind of interference pattern), the lens's focal length, its F value (how wide the aperture opens), and the focusing distance.
- Environment: the physical distance between the display and the camera.
All of these numbers feed into a determination unit, the decision-making core of the device, which outputs a verdict on whether an artifact (a moiré pattern, banding, or similar interference) will occur in the captured video.
The patent doesn't describe a fix for artifacts once they appear; it describes a detector. Think of it as a compatibility checker for camera-and-screen combinations.
… characteristics of an optical low-pass filter of the camera, a focal distance, an F value, and a focusing distance of a lens of the camera, and a distance between the display and the camera …
Translation: It factors in camera lens settings and physical distance to predict how the camera will see the screen.
What this means for video production and broadcast
For broadcast engineers, live-event crews, and anyone shooting screen content professionally, guessing whether a camera-display pairing will cause problems is currently a matter of experience and trial and error. A tool that calculates the answer from first principles could save real time and prevent costly re-shoots.
Sony makes both professional cameras and display hardware, so a system like this could sit inside camera firmware, a production app, or a pre-shoot planning tool. The practical value depends entirely on how accurate the underlying math is and whether Sony ships it in any form, but the problem it addresses is real and common enough that even a rough prediction would be useful to working camera operators.
That makes this Sony's 76th filing we've tracked in our Display patents coverage since May, adding to work like a dual comparator pixel circuit and an imaging device.
What's described here is essentially a calculator: feed in a list of camera and display measurements, get back a yes-or-no answer about whether the footage will show unwanted flickering patterns. No new hardware required, which means the shortest path to a product is probably a simple app where a camera operator selects their gear, enters how far apart the camera and screen will be, and gets a warning before rolling.
The harder version, where this check happens automatically inside the camera itself, would need Sony's camera software and display systems to share information far more tightly than they typically do today.
The underlying problem is real: video crews lose time on set when interference patterns only show up after shooting begins. A tool that flags the issue in advance has a clear reason to exist, and the document suggests it needs only software to get started.
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The drawings
30 drawing sheets from US 2026/0261742 A1 · click any drawing to enlarge
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