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Most people can't tell the difference between 30 and 60Hz, except in certain situations. Most TV programs are filmed at 30Hz, and until very recently, most movi

Most people can't tell the difference between 30 and 60Hz, except in certain situations. Most TV programs are filmed at 30Hz, and until very recently, most movies were filmed at 24Hz. You may notice a little bit of stuttering during long, slow pans, but for everything else, it should work pretty well.

ChuckMcM 13y ago
As a long time Amiga user who had a 'flicker fixer' card I can assure you that some people can and do notice significant degradation of the monitor experience at 30hz. Now granted part of that was the fact that 30Hz interleaved had really annoying flicker on single pixel horizontal lines, but even the 'turn your head and it blinks' stuff was pretty annoying too. I'd be interested to see this display in action (not quite interested enough to experiment with $500 though) to see how it affected my vision of things.
- barrkel 13y ago
  There's a massive difference between a CRT at 30 Hz and an LCD at 30 Hz. A 30 Hz CRT is terrible in direct proportion to how bright it is, and it very visibly flickers. 60 Hz CRTs also visibly and annoyingly flicker with eye saccades, or if you wave your fingers in front of the screen. CRTs need to approach 75-85 Hz before they are all-day tolerable with white backgrounds. LCDs have a continuous backlight and the liquid crystals need to change orientation to change frame. There's no flicker as long as they're showing the same frame. Here the flicker is noticeable as jerky motion, and is mostly just a problem for video, games, mouse cursor motion, smooth scrolling, etc.
- fallous 13y ago
  I'm not sure if you're misremembering the Amiga flicker-fixer but the FF converted the 15KHz interlaced display of the Amiga to 30KHz (VGA style). It was the 15KHz interlace flickering that was noticeable, not the upgraded 30KHz signal from the FF.
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    I didn't write my comment clearly, with the FF it was not an issue, but without the FF the display in interlaced mode was painful. I had a long phosphor monitor which I used to mitigate that but until I got the FF it was an issue. That said, the points above about the mechanics of LCD's being different enough that I might not object are reasonable. I've really not tried using a 30hz LCD display.
ANTSANTS 13y ago
I didn't want to believe this, but the other day I watched the new Hobbit movie in 48fps with some friends and apparently I was the only one that noticed anything different. The obvious difference in the scenarios you mentioned is interactivity. I find something charming about the 24hz look of traditional film (often even lower in animation, where "animating on twos or threes" can drop the effective framerate down to 12 or even 8 FPS), but I sure as hell wouldn't want to use a computer at 24FPS. Even outside of games, 120hz feels significantly better than 60hz just moving a mouse cursor around on a desktop. I'm holding onto the idea that it's something that has to be pointed out to you before you really care, but beforehand there is still an unconscious negative effect. Say, you're talking about the steps you took to eliminate a frame of lag from a game, and it seems ridiculous and pointless to a layman, but then they turn around and complain that their game feels "unresponsive" or "floaty" ("I pressed the button and he didn't do anything!") The problem still affected them, they just didn't know what to attribute it to (or perhaps having not experienced, say, a PC FPS played on a CRT monitor, they don't have a frame of reference for how responsive a game should feel).
bkurtz13 13y ago
The reason this works for movies and not computer games is simple. Movie cameras let in light in a fashion similar to your eye, and thus at 24 fps motion blur is perceived the same way you see a blur when waving your hand rapidly in front of your face. Games however are rendered one frame at a time, and each frame the positions of everything on the screen are updated with no blurring or interpolation between frames. Thus a higher framerate is needed to achieve a "smooth" motion effect.
- crwll 13y ago
  Motion blur is a very common effect used on games nowadays. Luckily it can usually be turned off.
stephen_g 13y ago
Almost all movies are still filmed at 24fps. The thing is, movies aren't shown at 24fps - they actually flash each frame on and off a few times to reduce flicker. It used to be done with a multiple bladed shutter on film projectors, but I believe digital projectors and TVs can do the same thing (on the TV if you turn off that awful motion interpolation that they all have turned on by default for some reason). But one thing movies don't typically have is a very fast moving mouse pointer on the screen all the time... The mouse, and fast scrolls on web pages and stuff will likely have issues at 30Hz.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

As a long time Amiga user who had a 'flicker fixer' card I can assure you that some people can and do notice significant degradation of the monitor experience at 30hz. Now granted part of that was the fact that 30Hz interleaved had really annoying flicker on single pixel horizontal lines, but even the 'turn your head and it blinks' stuff was pretty annoying too. I'd be interested to see this display in action (not quite interested enough to experiment with $500 though) to see how it affected my vision of things.

barrkel 13y ago
There's a massive difference between a CRT at 30 Hz and an LCD at 30 Hz. A 30 Hz CRT is terrible in direct proportion to how bright it is, and it very visibly flickers. 60 Hz CRTs also visibly and annoyingly flicker with eye saccades, or if you wave your fingers in front of the screen. CRTs need to approach 75-85 Hz before they are all-day tolerable with white backgrounds. LCDs have a continuous backlight and the liquid crystals need to change orientation to change frame. There's no flicker as long as they're showing the same frame. Here the flicker is noticeable as jerky motion, and is mostly just a problem for video, games, mouse cursor motion, smooth scrolling, etc.
fallous 13y ago
I'm not sure if you're misremembering the Amiga flicker-fixer but the FF converted the 15KHz interlaced display of the Amiga to 30KHz (VGA style). It was the 15KHz interlace flickering that was noticeable, not the upgraded 30KHz signal from the FF.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  I didn't write my comment clearly, with the FF it was not an issue, but without the FF the display in interlaced mode was painful. I had a long phosphor monitor which I used to mitigate that but until I got the FF it was an issue. That said, the points above about the mechanics of LCD's being different enough that I might not object are reasonable. I've really not tried using a 30hz LCD display.

ANTSANTS 13y ago

I didn't want to believe this, but the other day I watched the new Hobbit movie in 48fps with some friends and apparently I was the only one that noticed anything different. The obvious difference in the scenarios you mentioned is interactivity. I find something charming about the 24hz look of traditional film (often even lower in animation, where "animating on twos or threes" can drop the effective framerate down to 12 or even 8 FPS), but I sure as hell wouldn't want to use a computer at 24FPS. Even outside of games, 120hz feels significantly better than 60hz just moving a mouse cursor around on a desktop. I'm holding onto the idea that it's something that has to be pointed out to you before you really care, but beforehand there is still an unconscious negative effect. Say, you're talking about the steps you took to eliminate a frame of lag from a game, and it seems ridiculous and pointless to a layman, but then they turn around and complain that their game feels "unresponsive" or "floaty" ("I pressed the button and he didn't do anything!") The problem still affected them, they just didn't know what to attribute it to (or perhaps having not experienced, say, a PC FPS played on a CRT monitor, they don't have a frame of reference for how responsive a game should feel).

bkurtz13 13y ago

The reason this works for movies and not computer games is simple. Movie cameras let in light in a fashion similar to your eye, and thus at 24 fps motion blur is perceived the same way you see a blur when waving your hand rapidly in front of your face. Games however are rendered one frame at a time, and each frame the positions of everything on the screen are updated with no blurring or interpolation between frames. Thus a higher framerate is needed to achieve a "smooth" motion effect.

crwll 13y ago
Motion blur is a very common effect used on games nowadays. Luckily it can usually be turned off.

stephen_g 13y ago

Almost all movies are still filmed at 24fps. The thing is, movies aren't shown at 24fps - they actually flash each frame on and off a few times to reduce flicker. It used to be done with a multiple bladed shutter on film projectors, but I believe digital projectors and TVs can do the same thing (on the TV if you turn off that awful motion interpolation that they all have turned on by default for some reason). But one thing movies don't typically have is a very fast moving mouse pointer on the screen all the time... The mouse, and fast scrolls on web pages and stuff will likely have issues at 30Hz.