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Answerman - Why Are Motion-Smoothing Televisions So Terrible For Anime?

Some people really like the look of high frame rates. So far, only four movies have been released at high frame rates, and Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy were three of them. (Ang Lee's recent box office bomb, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk was the other.) There are only a handful of theaters that can play these films at their full 48 fps frame rates, so almost nobody saw them in this format. Many of those that did reportedly hated how it looked: the image seemed flat, sets looked cheap and flimsy, and suddenly every seam of the film started to show. They called the look of higher frame rates the "soap opera effect," because suddenly everything looked like a cheap soap opera.

Even if you turn off all the image processing from a TV's menu, there will still be some processing going on somewhere. With flashing images (machine gun fire in action movies), my Panasonic HD TV tends to strobe, so you have to go into the picture settings, you know, Cinema, Live, Sport and so on, and switch it to Game Mode, which has the fastest refresh rate, as it turns off most of the image processing that you can't normally access as a user. Result no strobing.

The human eye has a sample rate of roughly 60-80 times per second, so beyond that, there's not much perceptible difference.

I'm not a fan of the motion smoothing. Years ago, my dad got a new TV that had it, and he seemed quite pleased because of how it worked with sports. When we switched to some live-action TV show, I asked him to disable the feature because I could see the effect it was having. He was pretty confused because he didn't see what I was talking about. I would guess that since he predominantly watches sports, and I predominantly watch anime, it made our perceptions different.

The only feature on our main TV that does annoy me to no end is Overscan. It crops out about half an inch from all sides of the picture, which is particularly annoying when playing video games or hooking up my computer to the TV. And every time when the TV is turned off-and-on or whenever the input is changed, Overscan gets turned back on. So irritating.

I think it all comes down to what people are accustomed to seeing.

In contrast to those who watch normal TV and movies, there are some people who grew up on video games and PC games rather than normal television, who can't stand anything less than 60 frames per second. It gets kind of ridiculous among a few PC gamer circles, who are in an arms race to increase their frame rates as high as possible. To them, to watch something at a mere 24 frames per second appears choppy and nausea-inducing for some. (For gamers, I think another factor is drops in framerate when certain games stress their processors too much, as that's jarring and interferes with gameplay. I would bet some of them associate low framerates with that sort of lag.)

There was an Extra Credits video about framerate in video games--if we take some of the commenters' words for it, some of these people's computers run on framerates as high as 200 frames per second.going on.

Honestly, it's interesting to see this other side as well, the people who cannot stand higher framerates. I'm used to seeing backlash from some games' lower framerates, calling them "cinematic mode," in which they accuse the game designers of sacrificing framerate for something else.