I wasn't sure what forum to put this in, but I was editing some pictures I took at a wedding and I noticed my camera was seeing something totally different from what I saw and was wondering if anyone knew why the picture turned out this way:
My assumption is you caught the television during a refresh scan, normally invisible to the human eye but possibly frozen in time by your selected shutter speed.
I think most modern HDTV's refresh at 1/120 or 1/240 of a second. Maybe some still at 1/60.
I can't check the EXIF on your picture. What was your shutter speed? I would guess anything faster than the TV refresh rate could capture this.
LCDs don't "refresh" as such, because there aren't phosphors. However, it is true that each pixel gets a new value once each cycle. (In the US this cycle probably is 120Hz or 240Hz, but in PAL countries like Australia it is usually 600Hz on good sets: 600Hz is the lowest common multiple of 24Hz, 25Hz and 30Hz, so that all of 1080p24, PAL broadcast and NTSC DVD can be displayed without tweening.)
To save the cost of building analogue amplifiers for each pixel, LCDs often set the brightness of each pixel by keeping it lit for only a proportion of each cycle. That's what I think is happening here: the skin tones and clothing have high enough values in all the R, G, and B channels so that all those pixels are lit for some period, during which the shutter opened. Notice that you also caught some of the time when R + B (=purple) were both lit but G wasn't, e.g. the woman's dress. The green patches along the bottom are probably bounced green in the shadows.
Some sets also spike intensity as well as regulating the on time of pixels, in order to give the illusion of crisper movement. It fools the eye in time much as unsharp masking does in space.
