Why does lcd tv look like a soap opera

It's been dubbed the Soap Opera Effect, because it gives everything that too-real soap-opera look, and for a lot of people it's the bane of their couch-surfing, Netflixing existence. I know their pain. So why the hell is the Soap Opera Effect happening? Because your smart TV is too smart for its own good. Television 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, everything else.

Our brains have been trained by decades of watching film shot at twenty-four frames per second. Most movies are shot at that frame rate. Soap opera effect is consumer lingo for a visual effect caused by motion interpolation, a process that high definition televisions use to display content at a higher refresh rate than the original source.

With 24p content, the film has to be scanned or the digital video has to be modified to look right on TV.

With 30p content, the frames can be interlaced to create a 60i stream or displayed twice each to achieve the fields-per-second rate. Left like this, motion looks over-processed and unnatural, so for many models the best solution is simply to turn the mode off entirely. It depends on the class of your TV, namely the display.

In good displays with low pixel response time, this setting is almost unnecessary. Making it easier to switch between modes could also be a solution. This soap opera effect is a common problem that comes up when a feature called smooth motion is activated, causing movies to lose much of their filmic character. The movement looks like a digital video, not like film. This problem is exacerbated by the high definition.

Instead, the increased framerate minimizes the video glitches at the cost of looking a bit weird. Refresh rate is the number time times per second written in hertz, or Hz a TV refreshes its image. Movies are almost always filmed 24 frames per second, or 24Hz.

And can you turn it off? Motion smoothing is a technology by which modern TV sets artificially increase the frame-rates of films and shows. And they sell you the TV with that technology turned on as the default option. Why does this matter? Classic movies especially look grotesque — just wrong — when seen with motion smoothing turned on.