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LCD movies look like crap; better on plasma screen?


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LCD movies look like crap; better on plasma screen?
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AWR
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: State of Flux
 
2012-06-05, 13:46

So we bought a nice LCD TV a couple of years ago and sports, nature, animated movies, etc., look great. We find the quality of normal movies terrible, a disconcerting plastic, weird, robotic image that kills the 'feel'.

1. Can this be changed by adjusting settings on LCD TV?
2. Would a plasma screen put out a 'normal' image?

Everything including movies looks great on the iMac.

What gives?

Tx
A
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2012-06-05, 13:53

Are there built-in settings for different types of programming? I've had cheap, basic TVs in the past that let you, via the remote, cycle through "sports, movies, gaming", etc. modes. The screen tint/coloring/brightness would change a little bit with each one. Maybe there's something like this buried in the menu controls?
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AWR
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: State of Flux
 
2012-06-05, 14:16

I think I've tried that but will give it another shot to be sure. Tx.
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Chinney
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Ottawa, ON
 
2012-06-05, 19:19

Hey AWR, I have noticed that too. We must be one of the last families in Ottawa with an old CRT TV, but it is a good one and I have not been sufficiently tempted by the picture quality of flat screens to replace it yet. There is something weird about picture sometimes with them. Distorted somehow. And I agree that does not apply to watching movies on the LCD on the Mac. Maybe those flat screen TVs are just too big.

When there's an eel in the lake that's as long as a snake that's a moray.
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dmegatool
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: At home
 
2012-06-05, 19:49

Could it be the frame rate ? Creating the soap opera effect...

And why are you asking now? You started to notice recently or you just never bother to ask? Any new blu ray player or anything? Where the movies coming from? Cables?

Me asket somez quest1ons
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Maciej
M AH - ch ain saw
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2012-06-05, 23:32

Wish you could describe the effect better...
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Eugene
careful with axes
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
 
2012-06-06, 01:52

Turn off every image enhancement option other than maybe the mildest sharpening and mildest dynamic contrast settings. Make absolut sure you turn off any of that MotionFlow or other motion interpolation features. That's what makes 24/30/60 FPS footage look unnaturally fluid.
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AWR
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: State of Flux
 
2012-06-06, 02:39

Quote:
Originally Posted by pscates2.0 View Post
Are there built-in settings for different types of programming? I've had cheap, basic TVs in the past that let you, via the remote, cycle through "sports, movies, gaming", etc. modes. The screen tint/coloring/brightness would change a little bit with each one. Maybe there's something like this buried in the menu controls?
Yes, the qualities you mention change when I do this, but not the creepy people feature.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chinney View Post
Hey AWR, I have noticed that too. We must be one of the last families in Ottawa with an old CRT TV, but it is a good one and I have not been sufficiently tempted by the picture quality of flat screens to replace it yet. There is something weird about picture sometimes with them. Distorted somehow. And I agree that does not apply to watching movies on the LCD on the Mac. Maybe those flat screen TVs are just too big.
Yes, we were holdouts forevah, too. Moving TV watching to a bigger room led to replace a nice old Toshiba 20" CRT. It is much better for the things I mentioned above, but movies/DVD series remain too distracting (funny, this doesn't seem to be the case with "people" in nature shows, for example.

Quote:
Originally Posted by dmegatool View Post
Could it be the frame rate ? Creating the soap opera effect...

And why are you asking now? You started to notice recently or you just never bother to ask? Any new blu ray player or anything? Where the movies coming from? Cables?

Could be the frame rate, but I'd have to see how to adjust that. Why asking now - just never bothered to ask. Also the TV is downstairs in the basement; we tend to just plop DVDs into the iMac and watch in the living room. We are thinking of buying another, smaller flat screen to replace the iMac so we can move it to a bedroom for homework, and we'd like to be able to watch "normal looking" movies on it (thought maybe a plasma didn't have the same effect and we could be done with it).

Me asket somez quest1ons
Quote:
Originally Posted by Maciej View Post
Wish you could describe the effect better...
The effect is a weird hyper realism, which happens to all movies/series. It is especially strange when watching an old flick like To Kill a Mockingbird, where everything is artificially clear and "life like". I think it is what some call the bad soap opera effect.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
Turn off every image enhancement option other than maybe the mildest sharpening and mildest dynamic contrast settings. Make absolut sure you turn off any of that MotionFlow or other motion interpolation features. That's what makes 24/30/60 FPS footage look unnaturally fluid.
Thanks, Eugene. I'll try that. A whiskey for you.
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dmegatool
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: At home
 
2012-06-06, 06:10

So you're talking about what is called the soap opera effect. You should follow Eugene suggestions or search with this term to try to fix it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Eugene View Post
Turn off every image enhancement option other than maybe the mildest sharpening and mildest dynamic contrast settings. Make absolut sure you turn off any of that MotionFlow or other motion interpolation features. That's what makes 24/30/60 FPS footage look unnaturally fluid.
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Matsu
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2012-06-06, 07:28

Chinney, Panasonic's Plasma sets are excellent and have very good pre-programmed settings for cinema. Whether you're after a CRT look or a cinema look, this is probably your flat screen.

AWR, as Eugene pointed out, the creepy people feature is motion flow or whatever your brand's corporate moniker happens to be. Most of the newer LCD's have it, and it doesn't look good on any content, and so far, any attempts to refine it have failed miserably. It started creeping into TV's with 120hz sets. All 60hz LCDs did a simple 3:2 pull-down which looked much better, but could have a little ghosting in fast action. LCDs couldn't refresh as fast as plasma sets. When they upped the refresh rates to 120, and then 240hz, they started to play around with motion interpolation to create the impression of high motion resolution, but it's very different from what a plasma set does. A plasma shouldn't give you anything not in the original signal, it just refreshes very fast. If you have 480 or 600hz, all it's doing is refreshing the screen that many times per second, up to 25x per frame for 24P content on a 600hz set. This makes for a very stable image, no ghosting, and no loss of motion resolution on the display side of the signal - what's lost in recording is lost and can't be won back. That's where motionflow and similar interpolation schemes get it all wrong, they make up anywhere from 1(bad) to 10(horrible) estimated frames between the actual recorded frames, and it looks like some funky CGI, they would do much better simple to refresh the screen and not try to interpolate the frames.

The worst thing about it is that some brands default to this setting, and no matter how often you turn it off, the TV turns it back on whenever the power goes out, or depending even on the simple shut down sequence of your home theatre. If you can get access to the service menu, you might be able to permanently disable it, but just try turning it of regularly first.

Now in the interest of complete information, we should add that even Panasonic's very good plasmas also have a funky image mode that may introduce flicker. These start with 48, 72, 96 fps (2:2, 3:3, 4:4 pulldowns). Luckily these are turned off by default, and the very fast sub-field drive 480-600hz means you can just leave it off, and feed your TV 24p, 30p, 60i/p and let the standard processing sort it out.

.........................................

Last edited by Matsu : 2012-06-06 at 08:02.
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AWR
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: State of Flux
 
2012-06-06, 14:01

Thank you, Matsu. The unit in question is a Samsung 6 series circa 2010. I think it has the MHz is 120. I'll give your suggestions a whirl. Much appreciated.

(And I'll look for a Panasonic plasma for the second telly.)
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Matsu
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Join Date: May 2004
 
2012-06-06, 15:44

I should note that some of this is just a basic difference between the way LCD and plasma lights up.

LCD's shouldn't pulse, the backlight itself will have a frequency, but the individual pixels are switch from state to state x many times per second. They stay on and should look pretty stable, they refresh to change state, and those changes sometimes aren't that fast, so there's some detail loss because the pixels don't always change state fast enough when displaying motion - it's mostly cured even on modest TVs now, where there's little pronounced ghosting - though the source material may still lack temporal resolution if it's only 24 or 30P.

Plasma's actual pixels light up and need to be pulsed to stay lit. They're a bit more like a CRT scan in this respect, they do blink, just really, really, fast. This subfield drive is not, as far as I understand, sync'd to the frame rate of the display material like a refresh rate or pull down. However, it's overall effect is positive because the pixels light up and turn off very quickly - 1/480th to 1/600 sec, so grey to grey to black to white to black type measurements should be very fast.

I have an older 480hz set. I don't watch any content in "480P", that doesn't exist obviously. The TV turns all HDMI content in 1080/60P (it's native resolution) and all component input into 1080/60i. That means pull-downs of any 24P content. To my eye it still looks better than any of the motion-flow options or other pull-downs.

I think Pioneer had a 3:3, 72hz pull-down on their highest end TV sets. This would probably the most filmic when fed 24P content - it's what the shutter on a traditional movie projector is geared for mechanically, 24fps, each frame pulse 3X to fight persistence of vision, basically 72hz.

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709
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Purgatory
 
2012-06-06, 16:29

I think all the bases are covered here, but interlacing could also be a culprit - mainly if you're watching older shows (especially if you've ripped them from DVD).

* ah, Matsu already touched on that with interpolation.

So it goes.
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Chinney
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Ottawa, ON
 
2012-06-07, 20:29

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matsu View Post
Chinney, Panasonic's Plasma sets are excellent and have very good pre-programmed settings for cinema. Whether you're after a CRT look or a cinema look, this is probably your flat screen.

[...]
When the CRT dies, I will look into it. That could be a while though. It is a quality CRT.
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AWR
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: State of Flux
 
2012-06-08, 09:27

Will try on the weekend. Thanks again.
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