You must be referring to some other effect.
The soap opera effect i observed was from having Trumotion (or other motion processing) turned on as was noted in that article as well.
I only found that article recently but noticed the soap opera effect over a year ago. The effect was easily reproduced with any source material; HD satellite tv or dvds.
When i first bought a LCD panel, first version Phillips that was about 5 inches in depth, what i noticed was a blurring effect especially for fast sports shows. This was related to refresh rates and the Trumotion processing was designed to eliminate that effect. Instead it introduced a completely different and equally horrible vision.
Funny thing is that not everyone saw the blurring in early LCD panels. Some people were just more attuned to spotting it.
No, I am referring to the exact same thing. And, BTW, you can get the exact same effect on a plasma screen that is not configured correctly.
If you look at the technology behind the LCD pannel, the issue is that you are bending or deforming a liquid crystal to block a back light from coming through with a whole series of colour filters in front. There was a lag time in the crystals ability to block and then open back up to let light through. as this was greater than
your eyes ability to perceive the change in each frame so you got ghosting on fast moving objects. This is different than blur. To get around this the TV would interpolate extra frames into the picture so that the in-between frames could be used to faster drive each pixel to the right state so that ghosting was eliminated. The sad side effect of this was it gave the effect of over sharpening the images and add too much perceived detail where there wasn't really any.
You can get the same effect if you over light a scene and add too much sharpness like they do in soap opera's.
But to say it's just in LCD screens is a bit of a hoax as many of the Plasma tv's started to add in oversample to take a 30fps (60hz) on up the refresh rate to 300fps (600hz) as a marketing ploy to have something on paper to say plasma is better than LCD that was claiming their 120hz and 240hz. Turn up the brightness on the plasma and it looked like a soap opera too.
