Megan McCarty Carino

All those spooky, slow pans and tense tracking shots meant to pull viewers into the imaginary world just look wrong to them somehow.

Banerjee has actually bought and returned two top-of-the-line OLED TVs.

So he bought an old plasma screen on Facebook Marketplace for $40, while two is a plasma partisan.

We'll be right back.

You're listening to Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino with more on the problem with modern TVs.

New LED and OLED TVs can display images in much higher resolution than plasmas.

The picture is so clear, bright, and sharp, it can feel like you're right there at the 50-yard line of a football game, and you can actually follow the passes downfield.

But the same advances that have made TVs better for sports have actually made them worse in some ways for movies, says Samuel Breton at the TV testing site Readings.com.

Movies and most prestige narrative content are shot at a lower frame rate than other TV.

It's a relic of film reels, but helps create the dreamy aesthetic we associate with cinema.

On older tech, like projectors and plasma, those frames were displayed in imperceptible flickers, our brain filled in the gaps.

But new TVs hold one frame and instantaneously show the next —

And because movies have fewer frames per second, they hold each one longer, giving almost a slideshow feel at times.

The more clear and bright a TV is, the worse the stutter appears, particularly in panning shots.

There is a fix on new TVs, a setting, if you can find it, that inserts fake frames to smooth motion out.

That's Tom Cruise in a 2018 PSA warning viewers about the dreaded soap opera effect, where everything just looks digitized, overly sharp, and almost hyper-real, like surveillance video of actors on a soundstage.

But without motion smoothing, stutter just keeps getting worse.

Mahesh Balakrishnan is VP of Consumer Technology at Dolby, which has developed a new system to turn motion smoothing on selectively, only for shots or scenes where it's needed.

Creators can encode their preferences in the metadata.