Jimmy writes, “I might be going crazy. I just bought a brand new flat-screen HDTV. Here’s the problem – when I watch TV shows and movies on it, everything just looks off The only way I can really describe it is that everything looks like a bad daytime soap opera. It looks too fake, too bright, too smooth. It’s awful. Other people don’t see the problem. Any idea why my TV is making things look so weird?”
What you’re describing, Jimmy, is popularly known as the “soap opera effect.” It’s the result of an intentional feature of modern HDTVs commonly called “motion smoothing” or “motion interpolation.”
This feature was developed to resolve an issue stemming from the number of frames per second HDTVs can show. Most films and TV shows are filmed at 24 frames per second, which has been the standard for nearly a century. Modern HDTVs…
