Quote: "The main problem I encountered was that most cameras are fairly low quality anyway, so you get a lot of varience (graining) between even "static" images."
You could probably get around that by grabbing a number of 4x4 sections of the screen as images and then averaging the 16 pixel colours of each section - rather than comparing individual pixel colours.
If the average colour of the before and after sections is different for more than just a couple of sections, then you should be able to say with some degree of confidence that something new has appeared on the screen.
TDK