Can one photocopy a computer screen?

Yes! And it is quite easy as well.
If you are on a Windows computer it should be enough by hitting the “print screen” button and then open “your favourite” “media” programme (such as Paint).

However, there are quite many free apps and services today that can copy or record your screen. FireShot is one and it’s an app that you install onto your browser (I am using Chrome but I think you can use it with any browser). When you take a screenshot of your desktop/computer screen it will be saved onto your hard drive.

@jazzjeppe I mean physicaly putting the computer screen or smartphone on the photocopier. Mine doesn’t have any way to hook up to the computer or smartphone.

LOL nice question! (It has me imagining putting a heavy old CRT monitor face-down on a copier, and having it break through the glass top of the copier.)

I’d be interested to see the results. I think it would sort of work but might look weird. Usually copiers and scanners that I’ve known use their own light and focus on the surface, expecting something like a piece of paper, so depending on the copier, I think it would either come out about as you might hope but maybe a bit blurry, or possibly more interesting than that, or possibly not work well at all.

As long as your monitor is light enough and it’s easy enough to do, I’d try it out and see, and hopefully scan an example and share so we can see.

Of course, if you want a perhaps-more-practical (or at least conventional) solution, you might try either taking your laptop (or the content on a USB drive) to a library or copy center.

@zaku I will try it on my smartphone. Will tell you how it works. Edit it didn’t work. Just put lines on the paper. Also the screen blacked out too fast.

Damn @RedDeerGuy1 I would be careful testing things like that on your smartphone. I would have thought that it was going to fry the screen or something.

I would imagine that the best result you could hope for would be a washed-out image of the light reflecting off your screen.

@SergeantQueen

Why would it fry the smartphone? It’s just light.

@Darth_Algar I don’t know what made me think that. Just didn’t seem like a smart idea. But I guess if humans photocopy themselves or animals it’s fine.

^lol.. have you done that?

Only thing I’ve ever photocopied was sheetmusic.

I scanned my cat once. She was orange, and the scanner did three passes, one for red, one for blue and one for green. She jumped off after the first scan, so it was a red image of her fluffy tummy and feet. She was unharmed and lived into her twenties.

I would think that the light from the photocopier would wash out the light from the computer screen, kind of like trying to take a picture of fireworks using a flash camera. To get an idea of what I mean, try shining a flashlight on your computer. It might work if you could disable the light from the photocopier and just use the light from the computer screen.

Let me explain myself better. Photocopiers work using reflected light. The image on the computer screen is not from reflected light. It is from transmitted light. Shining a light on transmitted light makes it more difficult to see the transmitted light. That is why we can’t see stars during the day. To get the photocopier to make an image of the computer screen, the light from the photocopier would have to be shut off. Then it becomes a matter of whether the light from the computer screen is intense enough to create a photocopy.

Nobody seems to be following this question, but it got me curious as to how a photocopier works. I found a link here Based on what they say, we can conclude that it is impossible to get a photocopy of a computer screen.