Why do modern phones lack the soap opera effect of modern TVs?
In: Technology
Newer TV’s use display panels with much higher refresh rates than the programs they are showing. That means the program is made at 24 or 30 frames per second but the panel itself is refreshing up to e.g 200 times per second.
In order for the motion to be smooth and without jitters and judders the TV has to interpolate the other 170-ish frames every second. It does that using an algorithm running on a processor. And algorithms like that can’t account for every eventuality. So they get it wrong sometimes and the motion looks weird.
There should be an option to disable the interpolation. Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus, LG calls it TruMotion, Sony calls it MotionFlow, and so on.
Edit : Sorry that didn’t actually answer your question. I would guess phones don’t do the same because of the cost of integrating or developing their own interpolation system. I think the decoding of most video formats is already done in integrated third party hardware (GPU chips) and tacking another stage onto that wouldn’t be easy or cheap. And of course the reduction in battery life isn’t something their sales literature could easily spin as a worthwhile tradeoff.
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