Marketing not to scale.

Recently we bought a new LED TV.  Reasons are a few fold.  We watch a ton of movies and want a great experience.  We want a TV that uses less power.  We want more crisp and vibrant colors.  Plus its cool to buy a bigger TV.  No envy really, its just great to have the picture come alive in your house if you love that sort of thing.  It was a real no brainer and right now, we love the TV.  But when we first got it we hated it and that almost led to us returning it.

This is post is about why.

The question.

So ill start off with a question.  You ever been in a store hocking new TVs and you look at the latest model and notice that the movie or TV show looks totally fake?  Does the image look like a Soap Opera, British TV show or something filmed on set?  Does it look like it was filmed as home video?  I have.  When I plugged in my new Samsung TV the image looked just like that.  It sucked.  It sucked because it didn’t look like what I come to expect a movie or TV show to look like.  When I watch “The Dark Knight” I don’t expect it to look like a British comedy OR a soap opera, I expect it to stylistically look like the movie I saw in the theatre.  We watch movies in BluRay, I expect the image to be crisper and the sound to be more dynamic I don’t expect the movie to look like a home recording.

The problem.

After plugging in my Samsung my wife and I lamented that this image looked like crap.  We didn’t want to watch a home video “behind the scenes” recording of Harry Potter, we wanted to watch the Harry Potter movie.  After fiddling with the contrast and color and watching a few TV shows on DVD and BluRay movies we decided if things didn’t get better we would buy a lesser quality TV.  Reason?  The new TV looked like something so foreign we wouldn’t accept it as what it was to watch a movie.

A bit of history.

Come to find out we are not alone.  Come to find out the Samsung default actually modifies the original movie and TV show from its intended release.  To explain it ill stub in a few facts about TVs.  TV is generally broadcast at 60 frames a second or 60hz.  A hertz is defined a clock cycle per second.  So 60 hertz or hz is 60 frames per second.  Most movies are filmed/released as 24 frames per second.  Thats one reason why you notice TV looks like TV and movies look like movies, because, generally speaking they have a different hz rate(amongst other things).   People that produce new TVs need to keep adding in features to stay competitive.  One way is to increase the hertz or frames per second they can support.  Current middle Samsung and Sony LED models support 60hz and 120hz.   Ultra top of the line 3D models are 240hz.  So that means the middle of the road LED supports 120 frames per second!  Makes little sense if 99% of all source material(TV & Movie) doesn’t support it.  Most BluRay movies I have clock in at 24hz.  So, right now, there seems little reason to have a 120hz TV right?  I mean, even PS3 and XBox games don’t clock in more than 60hz.  Some struggle for 30hz.

Whats going on?

Samsung has a technology called Auto Motion Plus.  Basically Auto Motion Plus takes your 24hz, 30hz or 60hz material and adds in frames making it a 120hz material.  They “morph” or “transition” the added frames to make it look like a seamless process.  So if you have a 24 frames per second BluRay Samsung adds in 86 frames.  It attempts to blend them to make it look seamless, but as I have stated previously it looks really really bad.

Why this sucks.

It sucks because it doesn’t look like the movie you bought.  It sucks because Samsung is showing you the material by default in the way the material wasn’t meant to be shown.  This would be akin to Pioneer(a maker of good audio equipment) saying that an album needs to be sped up to meet some arbitrary feature that they want to demo.  Lets say Pioneer developers a really great sub-woofer system but the source material lacks prominent bass.   Pioneer shouldn’t add bass to the mix, it should work with the existing material not alter it.  Adding two bass drums or another bass note to a Rolling Stones mix is altering the material in the same way that Samsung adds 86 frames to a 24 frame per second movie.

If my wife and I didn’t take the initiative on ourselves to find out why this was happening the outcome would have been a returned TV.  We would have purchased a lesser model to achieve the outcome we wanted.   This is why defaults are so important.  I would argue some people wouldn’t be as resourceful and either return the TV or be displeased with the results.

Why they really need to stop this by default.

I appreciate the fidelity of the original artists vision and in the end want to watch the same movie at home I saw in the theater.  If you want to go outside the lines and add beats to the Rolling Stones song fine by me.  However, don’t add beats to it for my default listening experience.  Make it opt in.  If you want to add 86 frames to Harry Potter, fine but don’t do it by default.  I appreciate technology that ages gracefully but don’t force me to look at something the way it wasn’t created to be viewed.   I just put a few coins into a new experience to me wrecks the out of the box experience.  Let me wreck the movie if I want to, not by default.

In the end.

We turned off the abomination that is Auto Motion Plus and really love the TV.  Its so crisp and the colors are so vibrant the movies comes alive.  Good on Samsung, its a great piece of technology.  That said, don’t let you marketing department go crazy.  Its cool that you can support 120 frames per second and its also cool you can modify the source material to show 120hz.  That said…  just because it can doesn’t mean it should and certainly, absolutely and without hesitation not by default.

Extra reading.

120hz in and of itself does serve a useful purpose to displace judder for 24hz sources.  Im not going to get into it here, however needless to say if you view a lot of 24hz material a 120hz set does help you with original source fidelity.  Im not knocking 120hz as totally useless, I am knocking Auto Motion Plus.

I present this material to you as a opinion of a way I appreciate viewing video material.  I imagine other people may see it differently.  Realize this is the internet and everyone has an opinion whether or not you think it is correct is something else.