My desire is to make my computer monitor look as much like a mirror as it can.
My thoughts are, a mirror is a piece of glass with the right backing to make it reflective. A computer monitor is a piece of glass, and with a uniform backing of a certain color, could decently approximate a mirror.
Obviously, there will be a best approximation, because if you look at your monitor when there is a variety of colors on it, some will reflect your face/room back better than other colors. So is that best approximation anywhere close enough to serve as a passable mirror?
The problems that I can see arising is that the CRT is projecting that color through the monitor glass into your face, whereas a mirror accepts light from your surroundings and reflects them back.
Just turn off the monitor. That’s as good as it gets. If turn it on, you are simply illumiating the surface from the back, and that’s not going to change the reflectivity. Instead, the dim reflection is now overwhelmed by the illumination.
Monitors don’t make good mirrors. Reflection (glare) is annoying to the user, so monitors are designed to minimize reflection. This usually means anti-reflective coatings.
Monochrome LCDs are white (ok, murky green) when OFF, and turn black when a signal is applied. So if you display a completely black screen, it’ll be as close to a mirror as it gets. You can get a freeware utility for a Palm called “mirror” that does exactly that.
Get a digital camera, hook it to your PC through a USB port, mount the camera on the top of your monitor, and get live pictures on your monitor from it, maximized.
That’s about how well it could approximate a mirror.
No. A mirror is a smoothly polished surface, usually of metal, that reflects light. Mirrors often have glass on the front to protect them and prevent corrosion. There is NO color that a phophorescent screen can produce that will make it reflective.
Just in case you need a mirror for cough recreational use, remember, it has to be flat on the table to hold a line. Standing up it’ll all just fall off.
The glass is the support for the reflective coating. Look at most common household mirrors and you will see a nice flat sheet of glass with a thin, thin layer of aluminum (or silver if older) on the back surface. The mirrors in reflecting telescopes are glass discs which have one surface carefully ground and polished to a precise shape and then coated with aluminum. It is the shape of the glass support that gives the telescope it’s optical properties.
