The latest TV innovations have their critics
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What innovations are driving the latest TV technology?
Tis the season for TV shopping. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino.
Today's top OLED and LED TVs offer more for your dollar than ever. Blacker blacks, brighter brights, and up to 8K ultra high definition. But modern TVs have their haters.
I tend to be someone who is very, I guess, perceptive and very obsessive.
Rahul Banerjee, a tutor in Long Island, is among the afflicted. So is food scientist Vikrant Lal in New Jersey. He notices weird things on screen that other people don't.
And then you don't want to say anything because like other people like don't eat or they don't get it. And you're like, I'm just gonna pretend like I didn't notice that.
No, this isn't a sixth sense kind of thing. It's a problem with watching cinematic content like that on modern TVs. All those spooky, slow pans and tense tracking shots meant to pull viewers into the imaginary world just look wrong to them somehow.
The only way to describe it is just like it's very surreal and unnatural.
The motion seems off to me, like as if there's a skip, like as if the internet connection broke down.
Banerjee has actually bought and returned two top-of-the-line OLED TVs.
Even though this is supposed to be a better technology, I'm really not enjoying this. I'm really distracted by the unnatural motion on it.
So he bought an old plasma screen on Facebook Marketplace for $40, while two is a plasma partisan.
I don't care that it's 15 years old. Like, I love that old TV. To me, that sounds better, looks better than anything that's on the market right now.
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.
Who are the critics of modern TV technology?
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.
It is always a trade-off, right? Like, there is no perfect TV.
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 difference in space between the two frames sometimes is large enough that it looks like it's jumping between. It looks like the image is like flashing and bouncing back and forth.
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.
The unfortunate side effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film.
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.
You can actually make these systems more intelligent.
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.
We also have built systems where this can be to a certain extent automated.
Yep, AI could hold the key to more natural cinematic motion. For those more interested in the tried and true tech of yesterday, I hear you can get a pretty good deal on a used plasma. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.
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