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Switch off bad TV settings
- sp332 3y agoAnd don't forget overscan.
- jaywalk 3y agoThe fact that it's still enabled by default on TVs being sold today is an unforgivable sin.
- jandrese 3y agoWe had the perfect opportunity to dump it into the wastebin of history when TVs switched to HD, but for some damn reason the industry decided to carry it forward.
- sumtechguy 3y agoYou would be surprised how many movies on dvd/bluray have junk in the margins. Usually just a line or an overscan of the audio track. But a lot of them have it. I turn off overscan as those artifacts do not bother me.
- xp84 3y agoSometimes you can see the closed captions line of the NTSC signal at the top of the frame of the video when watching an old show converted to digital from an NTSC source. It looks like a single line of black and white dashes which dances around quickly every time the onscreen captions would have changed and then sits static until the captions update again.
- toast0 3y agoProvisioning for overscan on 1080i CRTs seems just as valuable as with 480i CRTs. People want content to the edge of the screen, but not to pay a TV technician to come and calibrate their tube to exacting standards in their home. Content creators need to know that some of their broadcast is invisible to some of their viewers as a result. Pixel perfect tvs came later, so the transiton to HD wasn't the right time. ATSC3 could have been a reasonable time to change, but then broadcasters couldn't use the same feed for ATSC1 and ATSC3 ... and who knows if ATSC3 will ever win over ATSC1, or if all the OTA TV spectrum will be refarmed to telcos before that happens.
- dissident_coder 3y agomotion smoothing is the worst feature ever conceived by man
- todfox 3y agoIt amazes me that humans continue to have this perverse desire to fix what isn't broken.
- kevincox 3y ago1. Features on the box. 2. More pop on the store display. It turns out that "fixing" these things do result in more people picking the TV. Just like an overstated display will typically be preferred in a side-by-side comparison.
- jokowueu 3y agoIt's only good for anime where the fps is extremely low
- dully-abrading 3y agoAnimation is the worst use case for motion interpolation because the frames are individually drawn and timed by the animators to achieve a particular look and feel.
- dontlaugh 3y agoSadly, (mild) motion interpolation is necessary for those of us that get headaches from 24fps video, especially panning shots. If only filmmakers started with decent frame rates. The few films that came out in 48 fps are so much nicer to look at.
- jiayo 3y agoIt's funny, watching films in 48fps in theatres (specifically the first Hobbit movie that pioneered the concept) to me looks like the actors acted in 2x slow motion and then someone pressed fast forward. Everything looks incredibly unnatural.
- sp332 3y agoPeter Jackson added more motion blur in those because he said that it played better with a focus group. I think sticking to a normal 180-degree shutter angle would not feel so weird.
- dontlaugh 3y agoThere was weird motion blur, but to me it looked far more normal than most films. I realise it’s a minority opinion.
- cassianoleal 3y agoI had a different experience. At first, I found things unnatural like you did. After a few minutes, I figured out that it was actually the opposite - it had a bit of a theatrical thing going on, i.e. live action vs. recorded and played back. At that point I figured out that it was just because I've been so used to crappy frame rates that the more natural movements feel out of place. I wonder what the first pass, with less motion blur, would have felt like. Maybe better, maybe worse. I kind of feel it would make it worse, in the same way that the transitional from analog to high definition digital made it look worse to me since I could notice the transitions between frames. That is, at least at first. I'm used to it now.
- whynotminot 3y ago
- lucisferre 3y agoI've tried filmmaker mode and it is just another kind of bad smart TV setting, making everything way to dark instead of way too bright. Turning of most "features" of these TVs seems to be the only sane solution. Of course perhaps it is the filmmakers that are to blame: https://www.avclub.com/how-to-watch-dark-movies-and-tv-shows-1849983750 https://www.avclub.com/how-to-watch-dark-movies-and-tv-shows...
- pipes 3y agoYeah I'm finding film maker mode way too dark on my Samsung oled. I can't find any explanation of how it actually works. Does a each movie get different settings set up by the director?! Doubt it.
- imp0cat 3y agoIt supposedly makes the content look more "just as the director intended". However, Samsung TVs are not exactly known for realistic colors. So turn up the eye candy and enjoy!
- room500 3y agoTypically, it means that if you put the TV in a dark room, it is calibrated to the same specifications that the monitors used in post-production used. Therefore, it is what the directors "intended" the video to look like since they were looking at the monitors (in a dark room). However, if your room has even a little light in it, the settings would make the TV too dark. It will also disable any effects the TV has that aren't "map video to screen 1:1" such as motion interpolation, upscaling algorithms, etc
- mjmsmith 3y agoI found FILMMAKER MODE (why is it capitalized in settings?) dark and muddy on a Samsung Frame. The "Samsung TV picture settings" section in the linked which.co.uk article [1] seem like decent advice. [1] https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/televisions/article/getting-the-best-tv-picture-adbBi9E1jDjX https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/televisions/article/getting-...
- 3y ago
- ryaneager 3y agoI treat the configuration settings from www.rtings.com as the Lord’s word.
- pstorm 3y agoTook me a while to find the configuration settings you mentioned. For anyone else, you go to a specific TV model's page, and there is a tab called "Settings."
- ztjio 3y agoThey're pretty good but when it comes to things like color, that can vary from panel to panel so you might actually end up with something worse. That said, I'd start there and if there's any question about the result you should just buy or rent a calibration tool.
- karmakaze 3y agoI'm surprised it doesn't mention "sharpness". It's tricky find the zero point: e.g. '0', '50', or '100' depending on whether it means 'add sharpening', 'smooth/sharp', or 'remove smoothing'.
- jwells89 3y agoThis is a frustration shared with some monitors, too. Either the zero-point should be obvious or there should be a toggle that disables the setting altogether.
- smusamashah 3y agoAgree with sharpness, I undo this on every TV I get a chance to touch at friends/family.
- WheatMillington 3y agoYou really go around to people's homes and change their TV settings?
- smusamashah 3y agoAs in I randomly knock some doors, ask to come in, find their TV, then their remote, then change settings to my liking and leave?
- smcleod 3y agoMotion interpolation is an absolute essential for me. I can’t stand how choppy TVs (even high end models) are without them. 30fps videos look very jarring to me, I almost always notice “tearing” or “shuddering” - even when in a cinema. Enabling motion interpolation / frame rate up scaling usually fixes this for me. It’s so distracting and at times almost painful for me to watch without it that at times I’ll use a tool (Topaz Video AI) to re-render videos to 50-60FPS.
- xnx 3y agoIs tearing common? What video source are you watching where the frames recorded in the video do not match the frames displayed by the display?
- smcleod 3y agoVery common for video footage lower than 40FPS. It doesn’t matter what the source is (AppleTV, laptop with HDMI, nvidia shield, PS5) - this is very noticeable to a large chunk of the population.
- wolfd 3y agoWhat do you mean by “tearing”? Like, VSync-off tearing or a different effect?
- Retr0id 3y agoPerhaps you're conflating juddering and tearing? - they are distinct. Judder is what you see with, for example, low-fps panning, but tearing is where one segment of the screen (usually a horizontal strip) is out of sync, still displaying the previous frame, while the rest of the screen has moved on. This is not normal on a correctly configured system.
- Retr0id 3y ago> Motion interpolation or motion smoothing increases the frames per second from 24fps to 60fps It's pretty common for TVs to have even higher refresh rates these days - my 4 year old mid-range LG OLED is 120hz, for example. Conveniently, 24 evenly divides 120, so when you turn off the interpolation you get perfectly consistent frame times. As a more general note, don't be afraid to experiment with the settings. If you're watching low-bitrate netflix streams, some of the artifact-reduction filters can be worthwhile, especially on the lower intensity settings. For watching bluray remuxes however, "filmmaker mode" or equivalent settings is generally the way to go.
- deckar01 3y agoMy LG OLED had intermittent contrast issues that persisted after toggling every permutation of picture bell and whistle. After finally stumbling across the correct search term, it turned out the offending feature was hidden in a maintenance menu that requires a button that only exists on service remotes… The same issue was fixed in an update for newer models. Tons of forum posts on the subject resulted in RMAs and refunds. How did we get like this?
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI can not believe people still turn on Soap Opera Mode. If I walk into a bar or restaurant and see a TV with it, it's instantly offensive from 20ft away. It boggles my mind how people really can't see it, or think it looks good.
- fortyseven 3y agoGenuinely tired of people telling me what an awful person I am for the weird shit I like. You do you.
- vsskanth 3y agoI'm one of those people who turns on motion smoothing. For some weird reason, it makes older shows like friends or sound of music crystal clear on my LG C2 OLED. I can't explain why.
- teddyh 3y agoAlso: <https://rootmy.tv/ https://rootmy.tv/>
- hunter2_ 3y agoI find the headline to be seriously clickbaity, as the word "smart" (in the context of TVs) generally refers to a network connection that facilitates streaming, telemetry, ads, etc. but TFA is not discussing that category of features whatsoever. It's discussing features totally unrelated to the growing popularity of disabling "smart TV" features for the sake of privacy and fewer ads. Unfortunately, I don't know that there's a generic non-jargon word for this collection of settings, but let's not solve for that by overloading the word "smart"!
- urbandw311er 3y agoOr indeed being a sort of tech apologist by describing it as “weird”.
- j45 3y agoTVs were sold to us with some degree of smarts, they weren’t really smart, and upgrading or replacing the smarts is too much work.
- layer8 3y agoThose are image-enhancement settings. Too jargon-y?
- hunter2_ 3y agoNot too jargony, but it possibly conflates the regular calibration settings (brightness, contrast, etc.) which are actually worth tweaking because they let you get closer to the original signal. The settings this article discusses generally let you stray farther from the original signal.
- gumby 3y agoAttend a CES and you'll see this use of "smart" is standard in the TV industry. They had net connections before they had special apps and the word "smart" wasn't used back then.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
- izzydata 3y agoFrame interpolation is so incredibly awful looking in my opinion. Especially when it comes to animation. I can not comprehend all of the people on Youtube that take a beautiful drawn animation that is intentionally 24 frames per second and increase it to 60 thus ruining the hand crafted perfection of the drawn key frames.
- tuna74 3y agoVery little hand drawn animation is done a 24 fps. Which make interpolating the actual movements even crappier.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI think the phrase they use is "drawing on 2s" for every second frame (12 fps) being drawn and "drawing on 3s" and so on depending on how many native frames there are between drawn ones. Usually, different things onscreen will be animated differently for effect/budget.
- HankB99 3y agoQuestion: Does this mean that animators draw every 2nd or 3rd frame and then some technology interpolates the missing frames? It sounds to me like that is not fundamentally different from interpolating 24 fps to 60 fps. I suppose there are two differences: 1. The artist retains control of the interpolation between drawn frames. 2. The computational resources available to the artist far exceed those available in the TV. Apologies if this is an uninformed question, I watch animation but don't know how it is produced.
- izzydata 3y agoThe amount of keyframes in animation is not even close to 24 and everything inbetween are called "tweens" for obvious reasons. From my understanding the tweens are actually drawn as well, but can be delegated to non-lead artists thus don't require as much artistic decision making. You get the key frames and then draw what you believe would be the transition. I suspect with modern digital animation you could do a lot of the tweening automatically on the computer, but even then you would be carefully selecting them and fine tuning it to match your vision. Then at the end you would actually have 24 frames per second to turn into your final video. You shouldn't have any frames where something is mid-movement and blurred between the two positions.
- imhoguy 3y agoModern smart TVs are so disappointing that I just prefer watching films on my 27" IPS computer monitor - no bloatware and every video just looks right. Not to mention that after 6 years the TV becomes useless junk killed by bulky modern app updates. I think there is a market for something like "Framework TV".
- imp0cat 3y agoWell, an OLED will be pretty much dead after six years anyways. Also, you cat reset an old, slow TV, put it in "dumb" mode, then add something like a Vero V or another box.
- jeffbee 3y ago> Well, an OLED will be pretty much dead after six years anyways. How much TV are you people watching such that this statement becomes even remotely accurate? My 2017 LG OLED display says it has 6400 power-on hours and it looks as good as new.
- sb057 3y agoThe average American watches five hours of television every day, or just shy of 11,000 hours over six years. https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-audiences-and-consumption-229018 https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-audiences-and-...
- sgt 3y agoLots of people leave their television sets on for almost the entire day, even when not watching. Never understood that.
- eikenberry 3y agoGives a feeling of having other people around and staves off loneliness.
- 3y ago
- smusamashah 3y agoI have done this on family and friends' TVs a number of times already. Most of these settings are crapy and very visibly making picture worse instead of better. Worse offender in my opinion is the noise reduction or sharpness. Noise reduction is incidentally also the one which makes Smart phone or other cheap camera outputs worse.
- Retr0id 3y ago> Noise reduction is incidentally also the one which makes Smart phone or other cheap camera outputs worse. This is all subjective of course, but I think you'll find that in cheap cameras, overdone noise reduction is the culprit, rather than noise reduction itself. If you're able to look at the raw sensor data, I think you'll find something even worse still. Small sensors are inherently very noisy, in typical lighting conditions. So yes, the images look worse than optimal, but not worse than if there was no filtering at all.
- hammock 3y agoDoes the same apply for audio settings as picture settings? For example, Dialog Clarity/Enhancement, TruVolume (automatic volume leveling), and DTS Virtual:X? Why or why not? Do you use Spatial Audio on your Apple products (which sounds great to me)?
- sbliny 3y agoConsumer Reports has a "TV Screen Optimizer" that aims to give users optimal picture settings by Brand/Model. Also nice that they mention how to turn off ACR and other privacy related features as well. https://www.consumerreports.org/mycr/benefits/tv-screen-optimizer https://www.consumerreports.org/mycr/benefits/tv-screen-opti...
- stjohnswarts 3y agoack! you have to sign up for an account
- shijie 3y agoI recently went down the rabbit hole to find a dumb TV. It was surprisingly difficult. I ended up with a Sceptre 65 inch TV, to which I’ve plugged in a rooted, jailbroken Chromecast. It’s been awesome. The TV is fast to boot up, responsive, doesn’t spy on me, and doesn’t need useless software updates.
- delecti 3y agoWhat's the benefit of rooting and jailbreaking a Chromecast? You can already cast anything you want to them, so I'm assuming there must be added functionality.
- codetrotter 3y agoThe smartest thing you can do with a “smart tv” is to keep it unconnected from your WiFi and instead plug a Raspberry Pi into one of the HDMI ports and use that for your YouTube etc needs.
- varjag 3y agoNone of the functions TFA discusses has anything to do with connectivity.
- codetrotter 3y agoNo but my point is that if you keep your “smart TV” offline you don’t need to worry about any of the settings on it. And that’s just aside from all of the problematic things of allowing it to connect.
- clintfred 3y agoBut their point is that your comment doesn't have anything to do with what the article is talking about. TVs having picture settings have nothing to do with connecting it to the network.
- Flameancer 3y agoI mean sure, but then my TV wouldn’t have VRR that was enabled with a software update. Plus a lot of TVs will just connect to an open WiFi network anyways.
- Liquix 3y agoOr don't buy products that are subsidized by recording and selling your data! Not to mention these half-baked "features" produce thousands of hours of headaches, tech support calls, and general unhappiness. $tvManufacturer could care less because red line go up. Build quality and software invasiveness are both going to keep trending in the wrong directions until people stop buying smart TVs. And it's not like you need to break the bank or order commercial displays - $150 on Amazon for a dumb 43" 1080p, $260 for a 55" 4K.
- clintfred 3y agoI don't necessarily disagree, but this article doesn't talk about any of that. It's talk about picture setting, like motion smoothing, dynamic range, local dimming, etc.
- jowea 3y ago> Wouldn't I have remembered Elaine being a 9ft tall blue humanoid alien with a tail? I never observed what TFA is complaining about, does someone have an screenshot?
- bkm 3y agoJust get a modern Sony TV and be done with it. They perfected Motionflow to the point where you no longer think about framerate (choppiness nor soap opera). It's clearly a priority, probably because they are the only manufacturer with their own studios (Columbia/Sony pictures). There is a reason people pay the $800+ Sony tax over any TV that has the same panel.
- richwater 3y agoIs it just that easy? Do you have any specific model recs?
- Flameancer 3y agoI have an A80J and it’s possibly the best panel I’ve owned/seen in any house that didn’t have something similar. My dad who is a big movie buff with an Atmos HiFi actually got one like a month later after being a big LG fan.
- imp0cat 3y agoIt's easy, but expensive. ;) Search for Digital Trends on youtube, they have a lot of videos about this. Their current "budget" pick seems to be the Sony Bravia X90L.
- deanCommie 3y agoThat doesn't make sense. Are you saying these TV's still butcher the original artistic intent of the creators for the sake of arbitrary petty consumer desires to have their expensive TV purchase be justified? But they just do it better than the other manufacturers do?
- flir 3y agoC'mon, that's a reddit-level wilful misinterpretation of what he actually said. I mean, look: Are you saying the original artistic intent of the creators to insert unskippable ads at the beginning of the disc is more important than the consumer's right to control the playback of the content they bought? Plus I heard it might kill babies. See? It's just silly.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoThe thing I hate about "advice" like this is that it assumes that everyone likes the same things and feels the same way, and it comes across as an attempt to shame anyone otherwise. I like motion interpolation. I always have it turned on, and I chose my TV based on the quality of its motion interpolation. Screens are so big these days, that if you're watching a 24fps movie, any panning movement becomes a horrible juddering shaking movement. Judder judder judder... ugh. I can't stand it. With motion interpolation turned on, everything is silky smooth, and I can actually see what's on the screen, even when the picture is moving. So no, I won't be turning it off, and I suggest that the next time you watch a shakey-cam action movie, you try turning it on too!
- Angostura 3y agoI understand and agree with what you are saying, but I think your preference for motion interpolation is quite unusual. Perhaps it is a preference that will change with generations.
- lupusreal 3y agoProbably not, young people watch most of their content on phones/etc, not big TVs with motion interpolation.
- nomel 3y agoThis is absolutely the case with all of the nieces/nephews that I know. They prefer that they see the majority of, tablets, which 81% of kids have these days [1]. [1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiWxs6s7faCAxWBhu4BHfhxBycQFnoECBIQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.census.gov%2Flibrary%2Fstories%2F2023%2F04%2Ftablets-more-common-in-households-with-children.html%23%3A~%3Atext%3DIn%25202021%252C%252081%2525%2520of%2520households%2C17%2520years%2520old%2520%25E2%2580%2594%2520owned%2520tablets.&usg=AOvVaw19iQbGRbXNfaugnb7VMVEY&opi=89978449 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- jasonfarnon 3y ago
- rubatuga 3y agoNoise reduction and dynamic brightness aren't too bad if done tastefully. But it's really up to the TV manufacturers to do it properly which is why there is just general advice to turn it off.
- cpeterso 3y agoA couple years ago, my Samsung TV slowed to a crawl. Each click through a menu took multiple seconds. I eventually discovered a new setting buried deep to turn off "real-time anti-virus scanning". That immediately fixed the performance problems. How would my TV get a virus? This was a Tizen TV, not an Android TV where I'm installing shady apps. https://www.techspot.com/news/78967-samsung-loading-mcafee-antivirus-software-smart-tvs.html https://www.techspot.com/news/78967-samsung-loading-mcafee-a...
- tuna74 3y ago"At first this seems great. Why shouldn't 90s sitcoms seem like they were filmed in 4k at 60 frames per second? Then you start noticing things…" Interpolation will never give the same results as actual capture, so the author is wrong here.
- fideloper 3y agoOne thing I seemingly can’t disable is how my samsung tv gets louder when ambient noise is high. I absolutely do not want my TV to get louder when one of my kids is shrieking. Just adds stress on top of stress
- JohnFen 3y agoIf nothing else works, you could open the TV up and disable the microphone.
- j45 3y agoI believe there is a setting for that. Using an external receiver can help too.
- Daneel_ 3y agoOpen TV. Find microphone. Apply tape.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoApply dollop of superglue, THEN tape for maximum quiet
- AlecSchueler 3y agoJust gotta find a proprietary Samsung screwdriver first.
- justinclift 3y agoThis should be what you're looking for: :) https://www.milwaukeetool.com/Products/Hand-Tools/Hammers/48-22-9020 https://www.milwaukeetool.com/Products/Hand-Tools/Hammers/48...
- autoexec 3y agoscrew tape, cut it out. Any samsung TV with a microphone and an internet connection is probably sending everything it picks up to data brokers.
- j45 3y agoAnother neat idea is to connect all “smart” equipment to an isolated vlan and separate wifi that can still be seen by your normal network devices. For example if your wifi was called “Home”, an additional “Home-IoT” is for every device. The IoT devices can then be set to not sniff your network, or even connect out if you want. A good example of this is in this EdgeRouter setup guide, which is a pretty decent guide on how to plan a home network for more than just basic home browsing. https://github.com/mjp66/Ubiquiti/blob/master/Ubiquiti%20Home%20Network.pdf https://github.com/mjp66/Ubiquiti/blob/master/Ubiquiti%20Hom...
- rocqua 3y agoThe local dimming suggestion isn't fully in line with the rest. It's about bringing some parts of the image closer to whats intended by the filmmaker, at the cost of other parts of the image (usually noticeable by adding gradients to flat color). That isn't going against the filmmaker's intention, so much as respecting the contrast the filmmaker wants at the cost of some gradients. It's a different way to approximate the actual signal the TV should send.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI wonder what it would look like if you designed a movie to glitch these settings as badly as possible.
- andersa 3y agoImagine actually, unironically watching a movie with the motion smoothing off. Yes, I sure like to watch my movie on Google Slides and see every single frame during camera pans. Perhaps once movies are recorded at a frame rate from the current decade this advice will be useful. We play PC games at 144Hz+ for a reason. There is no need for movies to still run a format derived from technical limitations of a hundred years ago.
- resters 3y agoit is surprising that manufacturers turn on motion smoothing by default, as it ruins the aesthetic of most content and makes it look like it was shot on a 1990s camcorder.
- theragra 3y agoNew generations will get used to more fps, and new content then would be able to filmed at 60 fps. I think that's a good thing. We can't be stuck in the past because of current habits
- resters 3y agoTrue. However my theory is that filmmakers would not use the same shots in a 60fps world that they use in a 24fps world. The aesthetic of it is so different, seemingly much about the creative aspects of a production would be done differently. Motion blur is evidently used by filmmakers in an artistic/aesthetic way similar to the way rock bands use guitar distortion and electronic musicians let some signals clip, photographers use lens flare, use limited camera dynamic range for artistic effects, etc. Adding a post-production step to remove the "limitations" that were used artistically does alter the aesthetics of the production. Imagine if metal albums were played back on "better" stereo equipment that removed all of the distortion products produced by the amplifiers.
- theragra 3y agoThat's for sure. Still, if you want you can always use older tech, like they do with film cameras now.
- maxgashkov 3y agoObligatory PSA to enable the setting to set correct framerate of the content from the source you're playing if you have at least 120hz-capable panel. E.g. if you're playing 24fps movie from a device that's reporting 60fps uniformly across all content, you will have a bad time. For Apple TV it can be set like this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102277 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102277
- porjo 3y agoNot a smart tv problem specifically, but the inability to adjust volume level while on mute (at least adjust down). I often turn the tv on after the rest of the household has gone to bed and it's way too loud, so I hit mute. But as soon as I hit volume down, sounds comes back on at the initial loud volume! Aargh. Only thing is to navigate away to a silent input, adjust volume, then navigate back to previous channel. Annoying. I have seen this feature once before (Sony I think).
- mrangle 3y agoAt first, I bought into the "switch off weird (Ai) settings" talk. Quickly, it became apparent that I couldn't come close to the overall picture quality potential with manual settings. This is for a late model qled. The chip and its auto-adjust capability are built for the panel. So now I deal with some soap opera effect as a trade off for an amazing picture in every other respect. And I rarely notice the soap opera effect anymore. One gets used to it.
- DitheringIdiot 3y agoWell, I didn't expect that to get so many comments. It looks like there are a lot of people with perfectly valid reasons to keep some or all of these settings on. Which is great. I will rewrite the article to reflect that — and change the title to something more neutral and less absolutist.
- saturdaysaint 3y agoI found this to be an informative and well-laid out argument in favor of motion interpolation: https://www.wired.com/story/motion-smoothing-defense-hdtv/ https://www.wired.com/story/motion-smoothing-defense-hdtv/ I have come to prefer it. I think this comes as a combination of recent algorithms getting better (there are relatively few artifacts and they are far subtler than they once were) and because newer consoles have conditioned me to abhor any content running at less than 60 fps. The jaggedness of 24 fps grates my eyes. I’ve had my iPhone recording 60 fps video for years.
- layer8 3y agoThose aren’t Smart-TV features, and they precede the introduction of Smart TVs. Smart TVs are internet-connected TVs with apps [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_TV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_TV
- dang 3y agoOk, sorry - the submitter did have "Switch off bad TV settings", and I changed it later to "Switch off weird smart TV settings" because that phrase felt more informative and does appear in the article. It doesn't work if it's wrong though!
- hackernewds 3y agohaha what a nit-pick
- phkahler 3y agoI'd be happy if my Samsung didn't put up OSD overlay at power on.
- interestica 3y agoFor those with a Sony Bravia panel (2015 and later I think), you can enable a pro-mode with a key combo that can turn a laggy and unusable panel into mostly a dumb display. Display, Mute, Vol +, Home I used this to basically save a frustrating laggy panel.
- ggm 3y agoI can't quite phrase this right, but persistence of vision and "frames" is really quite distinct from I+P blocks, and what we have in modern LCD screens is anything but a fixed rate scan. I really liked old TV. those wagon wheels running backwards were a direct artifact of PoV and frame rate. The whole NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM debate, was about what aesthetically is best against what eyeballs do. Personally I didn't get the argument NTSC was better for live action. I just think PAL was superior to all the others. Yes it was wasteful of bandwidth. Yes, it was analogue signalling of something which was at the fringes of what analogue and digital is (encoding colour as a layer over b&w signalling of grey levels, under a time code synchronisation for framing). But, it was also amazing, and I think we've lost something in MP2 -> MP4. We've also gained fidelity of what is sent to what is received and we've gained far more content. I do really miss old analogue(ish) TV
- layer8 3y agoWhat I miss is the motion clarity of impulse-driven displays vs. today's sample-and-hold displays. Smooth 60 Hz scrolling on a CRT is something so visceral that just can't be replicated on modern displays.
- username135 3y ago#CRTmasterrace
- grishka 3y agoScrolling on a modern 120 Hz display does feel extremely smooth though.
- layer8 3y agoHDTVTest [0] is a great YouTube channel if you want to go in some of the depths of this. [0] https://youtube.com/@hdtvtest https://youtube.com/@hdtvtest
- ssss11 3y agoI put my Samsung tv behind pihole and holy s** did it chatter. It stopped ads in the tv ui and I can only imagine other dystopian data exfiltration api calls.
- godelski 3y agoHow did you get the ads to go away? Some left for me but most stayed. I understand that this is because pihole can only do DNS based rejection. I actually had to reduce some blocking because the tighter restriction on DNS calls completely made my Samsung TV inaccessible (a la dumb TV, which may be desired by others but not if you want to use viewing apps like Netflix). I've heard chatter on and off about ad blocking through packet inspection but I suspect this would not be computationally feasible for a pi. But way out of my wheelhouse to even know tbh.
- accrual 3y agoI had to fine-tune my local pihole to achieve this with a Samsung TV. I basically turned on maximum filtering, then unblocked domains one by one until the needed functionality worked.
- huytersd 3y agoWhat do you mean by needed functionality? Do you mean apps like Netflix working or something more fundamental in the TV itself not working without being able to connect to the Internet.
- accrual 3y agoRight. For example, the built-in Netflix app wouldn't launch until I unblocked some Samsung-specific domain, despite Netflix itself not being blocked. So it was kind of like test feature > unblock domain > retest feature until everything worked with fewer/no ads on the dashboard.
- wpm 3y agoYou can hook up an Apple TV or a PC to your TV and watch whatever you want.
- j-bos 3y agoI just want to turn the smart tv dumb, simple input switch, volume up down, brightness/contrast, and basic color adjustment, that's it.
- godelski 3y agoMy TV turns into this if I set it behind a pihole and block all requests to it. I have heard some TVs will look for open networks (or known ones with deals such as xfinity) but there are none around be that I'm aware of and it responds as if it is dumb other than the features that can be turned off like frame interpolation. But those do randomly reset themselves which is quite frustrating.
- Flameancer 3y agoThe key is block all network access. A lot of IoT devices have hard coded DNS so even running a pihole will sometimes not work.
- drivebyadvice 3y agoDon't forget the sleep timer. Such a simple QoL improvement, and none of the TVs I've owned in the past 10-15 years have had one. Seems like every TV had it when I was a kid (or at least a good sized portion did).
- iambateman 3y agoMotion smoothing is so horrible…I don’t understand how TV makers have persisted with it for so long. Surely the people who make televisions appreciate a good picture enough to not spread this nonsense, right? The effect makes movies completely unwatchable. I was at a friends house watching Elf and it felt like watching Will Ferrell host a Zoom call.
- jasonjamerson 3y agoImportant to know that Roku has an "adjust frame rate to content native rate" which, insanely, is off by default. It will make up frames on all content by default if it's less than what your TV is capable of. I just got a new LG C3, and this was making us nauseous until I figured it out. I thought it was the TV, but unbelievably it was the Roku.
- klausa 3y agoThen Roku must be doing something _really_ weird. What this setting is usually used for, is to avoid "blinking" and screen going dark when you leave menus and start watching videos — there is unavoidable (...mostly. VRR kinda fixes it?) renegotiation period whenever going from 60hz<->24hz or 60<->30. So to avoid the TV going dark for a second to re-negotiate the connection, the device steps in and "pretends" it's all 60hz all the time. _Usually_ what a set-top box does is just frame double (if possible), or do 3:2 pull down, which _should_ be unnoticeable for human eyes, unless you're very sensitive. Side-note: this is why HDMI 2.1 and 120hz HDR is so good for everyone. 120 divides cleanly into 24, 30, and 60fps so you don't have to deal with 3:2 conversions ever.
- jasonjamerson 3y agoI went back and watched content that had been jarring, and it's fixed. My wife, for whom all this is instinctual as opposed to technical, is able to watch now without feeling sick. IDK, it's weird.
- zoom6628 3y agoEvery electronic device should be fitted with a large red mechanical switch labelled "Fuck Off" to reset the device to its most basic usable level. Mobile phones, TV, computers, cars, washing machines, any device where manufacturer or seller has options they can configure for you, should be required by law to have such a switch. And FTR don't have TV anymore since 3year old tested the strength of the screen with a hammer. Don't miss it. Hypnotic on Linux for news TV and Netflix for (mostly stupid) ways to waste an evening.
- cloudking 3y agoMotion features are the worst, I find they always make shows and movies look uncanny. Have turned this off on many friends and family devices, who seem to not notice until I turn it off.
- boredinstapanda 3y agoIt's a shame no one makes a control board for TV screens like you can often find for old screens like from digital photo frames.
- jeffmcmahan 3y agoAs a former high end audio/video salesperson, I just want to state for accuracy that local dimming, as a feature, is not dynamic contrast. Dynamic contrast is terrible. By having an LED backlight array dim spots that are darker in the source material, the display achieves better absolute contrast. It is not adjusting the exposure to fake it. It is instead getting closer to the contrast given by the source material. It created some halo issues, but it was a step in the right direction. This is not new tech at all - I was selling Samsung LED TVs with this feature in 2007 or so. Samsung, Sharp, and Sony has little choice but to improve contrast, because their LED sets were right next to Pioneer KURO plasmas that were just absolutely amazing - OLEDs are only catching up their PQ now, 15 years later. First on the scene was the Samsung LN-T5781 - https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-ln-t5781f-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-ln-t5781f-review/
- jonny_eh 3y agoI came here to warn people that they should not disable local dimming on their TVS. It'll make dark scenes look overly bright and washed out.
- ztjio 3y agoSeriously. Imagine people going out and proudly buying a shiny new MiniLED TV only to have their half-educated HN jockey of a child come in and disable the entire point of that technological advancement. Even normal LED backed LCDs can have FALD (Full Array Local Dimming for those who don't pay attention to this field) and that's not especially new, though, hit or miss in effectiveness on earlier TVs.
- account42 3y agoEh, depending on the size of the dimming zones, the halo can be much worse than the shitty LCD contrast it is trying to improve. At the extreme you have edge-lit displays which is just 100% useless at improving the contrast in any realistic scene while introducing very noticeable giant halos for mostly-black screens. You can get used to global shittiness but local and temporal artifacts will always stand out. It's all just an ugly hack compared to real emissive display technology where each pixel can be set to any value on the full brightness range individually.
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- 10729287 3y agoBasically deactivate everything, not that complicated :) I must admit it's always a pain when friends are asking me to aknowledge how awesome is their brand new tv just to notice that it's all défault, very catchy, but definitely not good and tiring to watch. Do you guys remember this hero putting papers on car's windshield to explain users how to fix their TV ? You are what you fight for !
- clnq 3y agoMy Samsung “HDR” TV can only approach what an HDR image looks like on a studio display if a bunch of these settings are on and balanced just right. It feels as if Samsung deliberately lowers contrast, for example, until their dynamic contrast is enabled, as the picture matches studio displays much more closely then. No proof, not making this claim, but it did feel this way when I had my TV side by side to a studio display.
- avazhi 3y agoOr just - get rid of your TV. I’m no Luddite but I’ve quite happily forgone a TV - and the concomitant ads and other irritants TVs bring - for nearly 20 years.
- omnicognate 3y agoA modern panel is a complex, powerful device with a wide range of capabilities. Human beings are diverse and even an individual's preferences can change over time. It's right that there are settings for this stuff. What isn't right is that instead of using standard terms common across manufacturers and clearly related to what the settings actually do, manufacturers expect anyone who wants to change them to reverse engineer what Dynamic TruScungle means, how it interacts with Active ProHorngus and whether 100 means the ProHorngus is turgid or flaccid.
- TheGRS 3y agoThis article is timely because we just setup our new cyber Monday Samsung TV. The screen was on for about 2 seconds before I recognized the frame interpolation. We spent a good 15 minutes going through the settings to find what we thought was doing it and seeing how it looked. Hate that they turn this shit on by default. Even worse is I’m always the one who notices it when no one else does. It’s immediately obvious to me and everyone else is going “I don’t see what you’re talking about”, drives me bonkers. And then trying to find the setting to make me happy takes too long.
- actionfromafar 3y agoI get irrationally mad at frame interpolation! :-D
- matt89 3y agoI feel you, I have the exact same experience. I always see this and I'm bothered by it, yet most of the time nobody else sees it and it's hard to really convey to other people what you mean.
- Too 3y agoWhat else isn’t right is when the setting is hidden four submenus down and the settings is covering the whole movie. Let me toggle the settings easily while the picture is displayed, so I can understand what it actually affects.
- prmoustache 3y agoBetween this and the embedded crapware, I am glad I went the videoprojector route. I initially though I would not bear the sound of its fan but since it is a constant noise the brain just filter it out. And I use my noise cancelling headset when I am alone.
- foresto 3y agoThankfully, there are a few projectors with very quiet fans. I haven't kept up with the current models, but Sony made some roughly eight years ago.
- grishka 3y agoI don't know if it carried over into 4K TVs, but I'm surprised that the dreaded HDMI overscan isn't mentioned anywhere. I'll never understand WHY and HOW someone thought that implementing this at all, let alone making it the default, is a good idea. You had one job, accept a 1080p signal and output it pixel-perfectly to the 1080p display panel. Yet somehow, someone thought that it would be a great idea to cut off the edges of the image and interpolate it so everything looks atrocious. And then every single TV manufacturer agreed and implemented it. Whenever I see this kind of cropped image on a TV, I grab the remote and set it to the only mode that should exist on digital displays, direct pixel-to-pixel mapping. Just blows my mind I have to do that.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoI have an Aorus 4K Display [Gigabyte], which is technically "not just a TV screen," and in order to defeat the overscan mismatch [having found no method functional either in OS or on TV settings] I plug the HDMI cable into a DVI->HDMI adapter [instead of HDMI direct from TV to HDMI output]. For some reason, this dongle hack, de-necessitates the overscan settings [which never seem to work/hold]. But of course then there is no 4K output [which is fine].
- diroussel 3y agoFrom my previous reading on the subject, HDMI comes from the TV world, and DVI comes from the computer monitor world. On a computer display, you want each pixel to be square and to be visible on the screen, a border around all the pixles doesn't matter. On a TV, historically, pixels didn't exist, and the nearest concept to a pixel (I forget the term) wasn't square, it was rectangular. Showing a border around the content is not acceptable, and it should go right up to the very edge. Also in the TV world, the most important thing in the image, not the pixels. So it's this philosophical difference, and separate histories, which means you should never try to get a TV to be a monitor, or a monitor to be a TV. Of course I only learnt this after buying a device which said it could be both.
- ztjio 3y agoIt's rare but some source material is created with the assumption of overscan, whether that affects on-screen graphics or even some cases just total garbage is produced into the overscan areas... it all varies, but from the TV maker's perspective, doing what you're describing means this garbage never appears and they never get calls from confused angry customers who think their TV is broken because some broadcaster has some garbage at the edge of the feed.
- empiricus 3y agoUsing the author logic, we should also watch kramer with the image shrunk to a quarter of the screen (the size of the tv in the past was smaller) and also using garbage color accuracy (I don't actually know how color accurate were tv in the past but I suspect it was horrible). I am still waiting for 4k/8k 100hz movies and youtube, but until then I will use motion interpolation on my TV as the next best thing.
- mrbigbob 3y agoI highly recommend when buying or setting up a tv looking to see if HDTVTest on youtube has a review of it. He really does a good job of going in to the effects of certain tv settings has on the picture. Be forewarned that he is in the UK so TV model numbers wont line up a lot of the time but with a little digging you can find your model that corresponds to his. https://www.youtube.com/@hdtvtest/featured https://www.youtube.com/@hdtvtest/featured
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- resters 3y agointeresting youtube comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcNOgMwH_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNcNOgMwH_4