My stoves heating element is purple on my phone’s camera but my eyes see it as red
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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I think that is because something is called infrared
You can also see a tv remotes ir light
[Technology Connections relevant video about electric hobs](https://youtu.be/ff04ecF9Dfw?si=QuOYI5G0fouazb1u) 🙂
I thought you all might enjoy this
It must be a ghost heating element! Spooky!
The northern lights were invisible to my eyes but my phone camera picked them right up.
Cameras can often pick up more wavelengths of light than our eyes. What it’s picking up here is infrared radiation (heat)
Physically, everything from radio to gamma radiation is all the same stuff, photons, with different levels of energy.
A camera is just a photon sensor tuned to the visible light band. A lot of cameras have a filter to get rid of IR light because, like you see here, it makes some pictures look weird. It’s trying to map a colour that doesn’t exist to our eyes to a colour that can be displayed on a computer.
There are also modified cameras which do detect IR with the explicit goal of making cool unfamiliar images. Plants usually look a ghostly white or red depending on stuff I don’t know.
The Samuel L. Jackson line of appliances
Damn, so much wasted heat by using a small pan for a big stove top.
Infrared. Get a remote control and point it at the camera, you can see the signal. (Also a good way to see if the batteries are dead)
Your phone camera can just see more of the electromagnetic spectrum than you can.
Maybe your phone is colorblind
Can you post also a pic of how do you see it?
>!/s!<
This is because the element is emitting infa red light, in addition to normal red light. Our eyes see only the red part of the light emitted and interpret it as, well, red. Cameras sensors can see parts of the spectrum that we can’t, such as infra red. Most cameras put a filter on the sensor to block these parts, to make the images look closer to what we humans see. But these filters are not perfect and do allow some infra red light to pass. This light is then captured by the sensor and wrongly interpreted as purple, since it is caught not only by the red subpixels, but also the blue and green ones.
Funny thing is, the reason you see red on these stoves is quite similar. The stovetop itself is covered in a filter that should allow ONLY infra red to pass. Without this filter, the stove element might appear annoyingly bright. But this filter as well is not perfect and allows some red light to pass through. This is somewhat done by design, to allow you to see the element in powered.
This is how Prince made pancakes.
Your electric stove is gaslighting you.
Have you downloaded the latest firmware for your eyes? Have you at least calibrated your eyes recently?
I feel a disturbance it’s as if million of burners turned on and got stared at through a phone.
bro got that arcane rune countertop oven
Child: Mom, I want to go see the Northern lights
Mom: we have Northern lights at home
Consumer grade digital cameras will usually detect at least some infrared as visible light. A great thing to know if you travel a lot – when you first arrive to a temporary lodging, turn off the lights and look around with your phone camera to detect any hidden spycams with night vision functionality, as that relies on infrared LEDs to illuminate the area.
Hmm… I don’t see purple now, only red? 🤔 am I broken?! 🤣
Cool, you posted the purple one from the phone camera but what about the red one from your eyes?
If you see it red, it means you are infrared-blind. Your phone obviously isn’t.
Never trust your own eyes. What the phone shows is the only reality. Bleep-blorp.
yep camera see infrared,you don’t.
Oh man: I saw the image before I fully read the title (early morning), and I was all set to ask the brand / model of oven, because that looks dope!
Ah yes, the RGB gaming stove.
something something blue and red and infrared and color spectrum
I see it as red. Weird.
You are insane. simple solution
This is most likely infrared. In order for us to be sure, you can make an experiment: Make another picture with a cola drink between the stove and the camera. Cola is transparent to infrarred and opaque to the rest of colours, so if you still see this colour through it, it is infrarred.
(You can test this with a remote)
Everyone has mentioned it is due to the camera picking up infrared light that is otherwise invisible to you but the reason it is rendered as purple in the photo and not just more red as one might expect if you thought about it logically is because the blue sensor sites on the camera sensor also have some sensitivity to infrared and so when the camera sees both a red and blue response from a particular area, it assumes the real world color must be purple when it is reconstructing the image from all the data from all those tiny little individual red, green and blue sensing sites.
Cameras usually have an infrared filter on top of the sensor to prevent this sort of thing (and some people pay good money to have them removed on serious cameras so they can shoot infrared photos intentionally) but really intense sources of infrared and/or a weak filter (or no filter if the manufacture is really cheaping out) can still get enough photons through the filter to cause this effect. You’ll see the same effect in burning coals too sometimes.
Short wave UV capable of sterilization won’t be passing through regular glass.
It’s only passed by special quartz glass.
The longwave, UVA, however can pass through regular glass, and is probably what was being detected.
That’s because it’s a cursed heating element. Great utility for potion making
Phone cameras pick up wavelengths we can’t see. A few months back, my friends and I went out of town for a weekend for a bachelor party. We were sitting outside one night and noticed the sky looked odd but it was very dim. Phone cameras picked it right up and it was the northern lights from a massive solar storm.
Over time, it got a bit brighter to the naked eye but the phone camera always picked up way more. Even after it looked like it passed, you could still see it in the camera.
I want to believe your stove is purpliscious and you’re just lying to us
The reason that this happens is because science and stuff. The more you know
Just tried it with mine. Still red but the colour is not as bright.
It really is mildly interesting.
The camera sensor must catch more light in the near infrared than our eyes do, and for some reason, the color space of your camera brings those wavelengths back into our eyes visible range as a blue-ish color, mixing it over the visible red.
Or it’s just the autommatic white balance going mad.
Damn it’s specced into shadow magic
Oh, an ancient cooking method.
I find it interesting on how you discovered this! I’ve lived for forty something years and have never took a picture of my stove! Hats off to you!
anyone else seeing blue?
Everyone in this subreddit is a fucking lunatic..
your phone has eye cancer