Why does my new TV look like a soap opera? Because TV makers are fixated on what’s called motion blur—an issue with LCDs (less so with plasmas), where objects moving quickly across the screen lose focus.
You’d be hard-pressed to notice the effect unless someone pointed it out. But since no one has ever bought a TV because the khakis-and-polo-wearing salesman said, “It’s pretty much like last year’s model,” manufacturers have developed “smoothing” technology and baked it into almost every LCD on the market.
It’s not entirely a marketing gimmick. The process does give a subtle boost to hi-def sports content like football or basketball, where cameras have to pan quickly in order to follow a punt or a LeBron James steal-into-thunderous-dunk-into-mouthguard-gnawing move. Unfortunately, the smoothing effect sucks for, oh,
? Also shot at that frame rate. We don’t consciously register the tiny amount of shimmy and gauziness inherent in twenty-four frames per second, but our brains see it and think, This is quality fare.
usually shot at thirty to sixty frames per second—which is what those smoothing technologies are trying to mimic. Your TV is inventing new frames and inserting them between the real ones. It’s impressive when you consider the computing required to make that happen. But it’s a hell of a lot less impressive when
Luckily, salvation is just a few button presses away. Every company has its own name for the smoothing tech—Sony calls it MotionFlow, Vizio calls it Smooth Motion, Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus—buried in the picture-settings menu.
Why does my new TV look like a soap opera? Because TV makers use a mix of trickery and deliberate design to achieve this effect. Some TVs even go so far as to create frames of content to slip between the actual frames from the media source.
All this jiggery-pokery is designed to improve your viewing experience, but it mostly just makes otherwise-great-looking content look cheap. In fact, it’s bad enough that several TV and film directors have signed a popular
While cinephiles may loathe to admit it, there is one place where motion smoothing is helpful: live sports. These events are frequently shot and broadcast at lower frame rates, and thus fast-moving content — exactly the sort of thing you’ll see in live sports, whether it’s a football interception or a speed-skating match during the Olympics — tends to look a bit choppy. If you’re mostly watching the big game instead of movies or shows, you may want to leave the motion-smoothing settings alone.
In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to disable motion smoothing at all. Even in an imperfect world, you would expect to be able to easily turn off this feature. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy.
The first difficulty is that each manufacturer uses its own name for the same thing. Industry terminology varies; you’re likely to see it referred to as motion interpolation, motion estimation or perhaps motion compensation. On top of that, each company uses a different proprietary name for its bundle of motion-smoothing tricks. LG calls it TruMotion, Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus and Sony calls it MotionFlow.
The next challenge is finding this setting in the TV’s menus.
