120 hertz, not right....

[redman]

So I am standing in Fry's electronics scoping out all the new tv's and I saw alot of people huddled around a new Samsung. I began watching and the picture looks breathtaking, better than any of the other tv's I saw there. The problem is though, they were playing a blu ray movie on another T.V. that was the exact same model, which probably was 24 frames per second before it got to the t.v. and the motion was horrifying. It hurt me to watch for more than 30 seconds. The motion rendering looked worse than any 60i I've seen. It made an amazing movie look like a soap Oprah or broadcast television. The people at Fry's need to get their hertz strait. Don't advertise the 120 hertz T.V's while playing a movie. Show sports or something. Luckily I searched through the menu and found an option to turn it off and everything looked normal again.

 

[Michael "Dorkman" Scott]

Yeah, I was horrified myself when I came upon that. I saw one showing Transformers and one showing Harry Potter 5. I have to say that from a technical standpoint it was impressive. It really made for a clean image, and whatever they do to counteract the motion blur works quite well.

That being said, I love the look of 24p and having big budget movies with the motion characteristics of live television was just hideous.

 

[NateWeaver]

I was horrified just reading about it from you guys. A little digging on the AVSForums netted me this:

1-120hz is so 23.98 doesn't get 2:3:2:3 applied. Usually panels are driven at 59.94, so even if a DVD player is feeding it progressive, eventually it gets the 2:3 treatment. Double the clock on the panel and each frame gets 5 viewings, which is good®. Makes sense.

2-Apparently, to justify the 120hz feature (and market it), a couple companies have introduced new motion interpolation schemes with fancy names. Somebody who was credible explained that these interpolation features could be switched off, but the panel would still be driven at 120hz regardless...and only the smart ones understand the difference, I guess.

Small consolation that apparently a lot of the AVS'ers don't like the interpolation "features" either even though there is a lot of confusion about with models have it and which do not. I saw more than a couple complaints about movies not looking like movies anymore.

I really find it disturbing that Japanese product designers see fit to screw with our work like that.

 

[Shawn Booth]

Samsung is Korean, isn't it?

 

[NateWeaver]

Yes. I was speaking generally. A lot of the AVS posts I saw were about Sony sets.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

I had a similar horrifying experience yesterday checking out the new Phillips LCD. I don't know the model, but it was 37 inch full HD. This is 100Hz model, being here in Europe. Not only motion looked extremely bad, the picture seemed "artificially" realistic, which was probably caused by motion estimation processing.

And that's not all.

There was some kind of weird artifact. Faster scenes left "watery" trails across the screen. When the subject moved through the scene it looked like it was moving through liquid.

I'm not against higher fps for a specific look, but true shot fps, not this.

This is really bad.

:waaa:

 

[Charles Angus]

35mm shown in theatres is shown at 24fps*5 = 120 hz - the big projectors have 5-bladed shutters.

As I understand it, the wacky looking 120hz TV's are not properly removing the 3:2.

That said, I had the same experience helping my roommate buy an HDTV - the 120hz model looked laughably weird. Ended up getting a Sharp Aquos 42" - nice, skin tones go a little yellow at high exposure, though.

 

[NateWeaver]

As I understand it, the wacky looking 120hz TV's are not properly removing the 3:2.

The point of my post is that 120hz by itself is harmless. Displaying 23.98 on a panel driven at 120hz is actually simpler and harder to screw up than what's been done for years.

It's the motion interpolation features that they're adding at the same time (independently switchable) that is causing the furor.