I was told by someone that 120Hz flat panels have no big advantage over 60Hz, but then today, as I was at Walmart picking up a Christmas present for myself (Star Trek on Blu-Ray) and I walked past the TVs running the latest Ice Age movie on Blu-Ray and I saw one screen that was what seemed like a LOT better picture. It was almost like a difference between VHS and DVD. I look, and the one that is a LOT better was 120Hz and all of the others in the line up were 60Hz.

Is it really that much better, or is it just that I was looking at a better grade TV vs. lower grade and the better one just happened to be 120Hz?

We were looking at getting rid of the old 27" CRT TV in our living room (my wife's idea) with a 40" LCD, so was going to start looking at Black Friday deals, but if 120Hz really is that much nicer looking like I saw today, I may have to hold off until the 120Hz ones come down a little more in price...

Nick, it may well have been that the 120Hz set was simply better overall(or better calibrated), especially if motion blur wasn't the main factor. If you haven't studied it already, this report should be of interest.

What tv had the 120hz?

Were the "lower grade" tv's hooked up with hdmi cable?

A lot of the 120hz tv's have what's called motion interpolation. When engaged, it makes the video look surreal, almost like it's running 1.5x faster. I don't like the effect when I see it. It looks unnatural to me.

I would never trust the displays at pretty much any store to be set up properly...and less so at WalMart. I've read too many times of using various connection methods, etc., to make one set look better than another, and nothing is ever setup for "normal" viewing levels and contrast anyway...

Ditto....Think about it. Your average associate setting up a TV at Walmart? I do have a 120 hz - and never really compared them to the 60hz. Before I bought, I read up as much as I could over on AVS - wrote down settings and reccos from the posters over there. Then I went to the stores that carried the TVs I was looking at and asked for the remotes. I became somewhat of a self styled expert on how to navigate the menus on several different brands. My experience - lots of other shoppers tended to gather round and most of my test runs turned out to be tutorials for the uneducated populace. One thing remained constant - with only a small amount of research - either on AVS or reading reviews rendered me far more knowledgeable than anyone that worked in any of the stores where I shopped. That includes the specialty stores like the now defunct Tweeter......Rob

Mark and Argon's cautions are very valid. I have a friend who actually quit his job at a certain big box store because of some 'less than ethical' techniques in the TV dept.

Even if they are not doing it on purpose, you would have to consider each TV's source (one hdmi, the other RCA or daisy chained coax), brightness and color settings, so many variables.

I know all about big box stores setting up TVs where the argument used to be that one TV was actually calibrated for the environment at the store since it was a price/profit leader, and the others weren't, or just the simple "we unboxed it and plugged it in to the closest cable" kind of thing.

I'll read that posting John and see what it says. Maybe it was the motion interpolation, since I really wasn't looking at brightness, color saturation, etc, just how "smooth" the motion looked... It might be one of those things that is fine for an animated flick like Ice Age 27 (or whatever it was) but regular TV it could become annoying... Good to know that it most likely means that I don't have to "hold out" for 120Hz sets to get a little cheaper...

My 61" Samsung LED-DLP does 120hz processing. I am very happy with it.

I've never noticed any weirdness with movement. Not with movies, normal TV shows, or sporting events. It all looks great. We watch a lot of football, and the picture quality is darn near as good as actually being at the game. I've never noticed anything strange regarding quickly-moving objects. It just looks, well, real.

But of course, this is 120hz processing on an old-school LED/DLP set. Things are a little different with LCD & flat-panel TV's...

The best thing you can do in TV shopping is as others have said. Read up on the models and learn what the "optimal" settings are. Then go to stores, be a jerk, and start adjusting sets. While shopping for my TV, I think Best Buy got tired of me resetting half of the TV's every time I'd show up. And yes, it takes about 15 minutes of AVS searching to know more than 90% of the big-box employees do about TV's.

I have a Samsung 40" LNT4069 (obsolete now, it is a couple years old and first gen to have the 120hz), the latest craze is 240hz. I haven't noticed a huge improvement in PQ on my set vs a standard LCD, in particular my father's 46" Sharp. I think his displays sporting events better than mine. My Samsung has the dreaded triple ball effect, this is where a thrown football sometimes shows up as a blur and looks like there are three or more footballs occupying the same space on the display. I have never noticed this on the Sharp. The response rate on my TV is 5ms and the Sharp is less than 4ms from what I have been able to find from reviews. I think this is why I have an issue and has nothing to do with the 120hz. I believe the double and triple refresh rates deals more with an HD signa(1080P) than anything else. Most reviews I have read state many TV's/reviewers prefer their TV with the feature turned off.

Peter,
Out of curiosity, are you OTA antenna, Satellite or cable?

I have a Sony XBR and I don't use any of the special settings. Just straight up cable and tweaks to the color, contrast, brightness, etc. If you read through the infinite posts at AVS, the consensus is generally that the special settings mostly make things worse as opposed to enhancing the picture.

That seems to be the case with many of the newer TV's. I went to a site that posts profesional setting of various flat screens(can't remember the name, bookmark on other computer) etc. and looked up my TV for settings. I printed them off and set the TV and to my surprise they were the exact settings found when you set the TV to movie mode, go figure. Nothing special with this mode except brightness and color settings no other special features turned on.

OTA and satellite (Dish Network HD).

Uncompressed OTA HD feeds are supposed to be clearer and better than compressed satellite HD feeds. But I can't say that I can really tell a difference. Both look great to me.

I pick up FOX & NBC via OTA antenna. I get the channels on Dish HD too, but I use the OTA because it frees up a sat tuner. I've flipped between the Dish vs OTA feeds, and other than a 3 or 4 second delay on the Dish feeds, they appear identical.

And I've certainly never seen any "triple-ball" effects. We watch enough football; that'd most certainly drive me nuts.

So....is Satellite compressed as much as cable? I see plenty of pixelization - even in some of the nature programs. The other night watching the Whales - certain scenes especially where the whales were breaching and there was lots of spray and splashing - most of those scened pixelated.

I don't know. I'd think it would depend on the cable company.

I do know that my local cable company sucks. From friends & colleagues, I know that their HD feeds *do* break up and suffer from pixelation and other digital artifacts. When we had cable, X years ago, they had problems with static and ghosting on just normal SD programming, and they'd blame it on the national feed. Yeah, right. This is the main reason that I (and many others in my town) go with Dish Network or DirecTV.

The only time I ever get any kind of pixelation, digital artifacts, or signal loss on the Dish is due to rain fade. Two or three times a year we'll get a big midwestern, hail-dropping, tornado-spewing, trailer-park eating supercell thunderstorm of sufficient magnitude to cause signal problems/loss for 5-10 minutes.

The local cable company in Montreal is passthrough for HD channels (I know one of the program manager there). Images are sharp and whenever there are issues (rare) it is always limited to one channel, which points to the source being bad.

Well, as luck would have it, Newegg.com just put up an AMAZING deal on a 46" 120Hz LCD about 7 minutes ago. I grabbed one as part of my Black Friday shopping. Not because it was 120Hz, but just because of the great deal on the size for one with decent specs. I will be sure to turn off the motion enhancement stuff when it comes.
I picked up a Sharp 46" 4ms 1080p(not that 720p isn't more than enough for this size TV) 120Hz LCD (LC-46SB57U).

Bad thing now is that I work 2 hours from home, so my family will get to enjoy it more than me. :-(

Oh well. It will be a nice upgrade from our 12 year old 27" CRT.

Remember when 27 inches was big? I had a 36 inch tube, and that was considered obscene. Now everyone flops 40+ inches into the living room like it's nothing.

Yeah. Keep in mind that a 27" "regular 3:4" TV requires a 33" 16:9 format TV to get the same vertical picture (with extra "width" of course)... But a jump to 46" will be nice...

Funny that you mention that. I went from my 36" 4:3 to a 32" 16:9, because just about everything I was watching on the 4:3 was already 16:9 or shorter, so I wasn't actually losing vertical picture size.