Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater What to buy with Panasonic Plasma off the market

Just curious if you turned off any "Tru Motion" or similar visual processing that was originally meant to increase the refresh rates.
I have a friend who bought a new LCD over a year ago and loved it. When i was at his place, the picture playback looked "fake". It was then i realized he had his Tru Motion turned on (the default setting for the tv) and when i turned it off, he didn't see the difference.
I notice it immediately.
I read that someone described it like comparing a regular tv movie to watching a soap opera. The soaps always have some odd smoothing motion to them.
http://hometheaterreview.com/what-is-soap-opera-effect-and-how-to-make-it-go-away/
This is what the Tru Motion (or similar) processing looks like to me and hence, "fake". The motion of anything on the screen doesn't flow naturally.

I turned it off on our LG LCD but otherwise i agree, OLED is for us in the near future. Never liked LCD.
Want to change out my computer monitor asap too.
Waiting....

This is one factor that ultimately pushed me off of getting a front projector system even after having designed the media room with ceiling connections for it (in two orientations on a long or short wall!).

The room isn't used daily, but cost, bulbs, sound, heat, the fiddling, just wasn't worth the hassle. Even less so with 70"+ flat screens becoming so easily available now for $4k; about the same cost for a high quality projector and screen, and our room can do a max. screen size of 80" before locating speakers around the screen becomes impossible.

Obviously other people have larger rooms and if you want a huge screen over 80", then sure, projection is still the only way to go, but very large flat screen technology is fast becoming the norm. Envision a 120" flat screen rollup OLED! No more projector needed. Has all the same features except no projected light issues.
It is coming.

I dunno guys. I have a 55" Sony LCD from a couple of years ago that is the model just below their flagship XBR line. For us, it is simply stunning with good material. The Star Wars Blu-Rays that we presently viewing are absolutely first rate on this machine.

I prefer a natural looking picture - not artificially bright with overly saturated colours that many people seem to gravitate to. I 'calibrated' it by using many of the settings that I found on the net that essentially turned 'OFF' all of the redundant picture enhancement features plus a used a few more tweaks that ended up making the picture 'natural' looking but crisp & clear as well. I haven't been into the settings menu since because it is so close to perfect.

As I've said before, looking at a wall of demo machines in the store, I can't see much difference in them except for the factory set 'Torch Mode' that the manufacturers use to make their machine stand out from the herd.

The only LCD weakness that I see is off-axis viewing that is not a factor in our room. My Sony LCD is a winner IMO & is by far the best display that I've ever owned. That is most praiseworthy because over the decades I always went with the higher end video gear...

TAM

I am still impressed with the Sony ES-95 LCD projector that I bought several years ago. So much so, I have no desire to replace it with 4K or something else. Maybe when laser technology becomes mainstream I'll upgrade.

I also love my Pany plasma TV. Just wish it was larger. Motion is fantastic, and LCD just can't compare. ...yet.

That soap opera effect is caused by an overly bright lit scene with far too much detail. This effect has plagued many of the lower budget films transfered to bluray or above. The effect of having something overly sharp when we are so use to the grain and texture you get with motion picture film.

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.

Perhaps there is also another reason for certain particular affects to show themselves on the screen of these new technologies and after checking with a couple of TV tech buddies of mine along with my own experience, generally speaking, even with these higher tech sets and superior resolution, if one thinks that they shouldn't consider having their brand new monitor calibrated properly, they could be sadly mistaken.

For those that might be interested, in my case, after taking my brand new 4K monitor out of the box setting it up to my basic specs(contrast, black levels color levels etc.)after watching for awhile, as impressive as the picture was, I noticed I suffered some significant eye strain yet I couldn't, of course, figure out exactly why? After starting my 12 pt. grayscale calibration, according to the readouts,there was a significant difference in the gamma, grayscale and color luminance levels between approx. 40-80IRE, i.e right out of the box,the picture was significantly brighter in these ranges than at the lowest and highest end of the grayscale so whether it is 4K, OLED or anything else, according to my tech buddies this issue is not that uncommon among all these newer technologies. It seems the manufacturers have intentionally chosen to jack up these levels to bring out the brightness and colors, yet, it is not something that can be readily corrected by just lowering black and /or contrast levels.

Once I did my calibration along the entire grayscale ultimately leveling everything out according to the proper specs., it is amazing how much more natural the picture looked, colors, brightness and contrast were significantly better and after some lengthy viewing, my eye strain all but disappeared.

Rest assured, on the surface, as impressive as these new technologies are, quite surprisingly, they still can be noticeably better.

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.

Sorry Matt but your explanation regarding brightness doesn't jive with any article i've read. The soap opera effect is related to refresh rates and frames per second.

This processing was designed to reduce motion blur and was introduced with some plasma tvs as well so they could market a high refresh rate similar to the LCDs. If you want to call the artifact ghosting, go ahead. Every other article i've read including this one refers to it as motion blur.
Tomato tomatoe perhaps.

http://www.cnet.com/news/what-is-the-soap-opera-effect/
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/wtf-just-happened-soap-opera-effect/
http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-test-results/motion-interpolation-soap-opera-effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_interpolation