Samsung to demo next-gen, 240Hz LCD TV tech

Samsung has developed what it claims its the world's first LCD panel with a 240Hz image frame rate - double that offered by top-end LCD tellies today. The South Korean giant said it will be showing off a 15in prototype next week, but admitted it will be three years before the new technology goes into mass-production. Samsung …

[Boris Blank]

Great, even more motion artefacts

Given that it's impossible to perfectly interpolate video, how can this ever look anything other than horrible?

Smoother movement is easy: somebody tell the friggin TV companies to stop filmising video and at least broadcast at the 50/60Hz rates we have available.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hullaballoo

She's cute, but she's not the Eee girl.

[Marvin the Martian]

A compromise

Couldn't you update 1/4th of the pixels per frame? This should take the moving blur away AND leave you naturally-unsmoot.

Or randomly update 1/3th each time, but make sure it's no true random, so that no pixel is unmoved for more than 4 frames.

[MrM]

Thought it was just me!

"The potential flaw is that some folk already complain that 120Hz TVs produce movement that's too smooth, it seeems unnatural."

Now it all makes sense! i know a couple of people with large Samsung TV's and i keep thinking to myself that the way people move on screen just looks strange? I assume those sets are 120Hz!

[Mad Hacker]

Once we have 240fps source material it'll be great!

Once we have 240fps source material it'll be great! Of course, that's a ways off. Someday I hope all motion pictures will be filmed at 240fps.

[Jess]

100 Hz

I understood that the problem with 100Hz (horrible) refresh was that it cause problems with the frequency of the little movements the eyes make when following things. Hopefully 240Hz would be beyond this.

[Anonymous Coward]

But....

You aren't increasing the transmitted frame rate at all. All you can do therefore is convert the interlaced (as transmitted) frame to non-interlaced, and do some interpolation. Most SD digital TV still looks crap to my eyes due to all the processing artifacts. Make the most of analogue TV while you've still got it!

John

[Anonymous Coward]

What a waste

It would be FAR more useful if the broadcasters upped their data rates rather than compressing the image so much that it's impossible to reconstruct it to create a half-decent image!

Then again, if they did that, where would they find the bandwidth for Buy-Shite TV, and Gamble-Shite TV, and Inane-Soap-Shite TV and....

[Nexox Enigma]

For my computer?

Finally something that would let me make use of my ridiculously high Quake 3 frame rates. Well, half of them, anyway.

[Andy Bright]

Games!

Not sure about TV, and as for "too smooth" the human eye can't actually see animation that fast - so it would appear to us as if the whole thing was sped up and I imagine that would look odd.

But it wouldn't take much to fix either.

The real potential I see from these screens are for PC/Console video games, particularly first person shooters. It would fix the tearing problem video cards produce, because currently flat panel monitors can only support 60 FPS. Anything faster and the image is corrupted (torn), hence the vertical sync (vsync) setting that forces the game to cap at 60 FPS.

[Asoces]

Oh great, another 'our number is bigger than yours' race...

Everyone knows that big numbers impress the sheep and make them want to buy new stuff. Personally, I'm not buying a new TV until they come out with a 1GHz model.

There are so many other things wrong with digital video, I wouldn't be focusing on how many more times faster the TVs refresh rate is than the source signal.

Q: What do you get when you interpolate frames in between 2 frames of video that contain a lot of motion-blur?

A: Crap.

Hehehe - OK, I'm finished my ranting...

[Ross Fleming]

All well and good when the source catches up

But it's either going to try and fill in the missing 3 (at best) frames if we're talking about any playback today (i.e. DVD, BD, DVB-T etc).

I just realised yesterday when watching a DVD on my PS3 with a 60HZ TV, it seems that when you watch it frame-by-frame, it only updates the picture every second frame - so rather pointless!

However, it goes back to the aliasing argument. Most TV broadcasts are aliased to introduce forced motion-blur. But the sharper the images (as is becoming the trend with HD), the more noticable the transition between frames - this is rather evident in an HD panning shot, you can start to see it becoming jerky.

As said though - will be good for Q3 :-)

[Brad]

and the ruination of film continues

No doubt they'll have another version of motionflow to further kill the look of 24p films.

[Henry Cobb]

Kill television

Place a date certain to eliminate television and just go with web.

Then content providers can deliver with whatever bandwidth they can sue the cable companies to accept.

Also assume that everything will be pirated and change the advertising ratio. Instead of delivering 6 minutes of ads for each 30 minute slot, put product placement in every frame and sell 30 minutes of ads for each 30 minute program.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too real? WTF?

"The potential flaw is that some folk already complain that 120Hz TVs produce movement that's too smooth, it seeems unnatural."

Yep, everyone knows that real life is filmed at 80Hz. Anything over this just looks weird.

Oh, wait...

[Ishkandar]

@Asoces

Unless you are a fly with compound eyes, WTF do you want a 1GHz screen for ??

[E]

@Andy Bright

Too right. The last CRT I had took up half my desk, weighed about 70 lb and could do 120Hz at 1024x768. It was a gem for online FPS games. I still mourn it sometimes when I play HL2 on my current LCD.

[Stephen]

@Brad

Have you seen a BD (or HD-DVD while it lasted) movie on a decent Hi-Def screen at 1080p24?

It certainly doesn't ruin film and it locks the refresh to 24 fps, same as the source material. Motion looks just as intended. This is only for DVDs and Broadcast feeds as all the decent screens handle the settings appropriately. It's one of the things I've really enjoyed with BDs. 2001 looks spectacular.

[André Marques]

@Ishkandar

I know you're joking, but actually insane refresh rates might be useful for broadcasting something twice... Say for a 3D image... 3D Glasses ON!

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung TV's

There's a smoothing mode in the menus somewhere, turn it off and everything looks right again.

I'd had enough with it after watching a very surreal Samsung version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

[Adam Foxton]

Awesome!

240Hz update-capable LCD screens mean 120Hz for each eye if you're using shutter glasses!

Bring on the headache free, low-profile, ghosting-free, ridiculously high resolution gaming experience complete with depth perception!

"Stereoscope- the way it's Meant To Be Seen"

Mine's the one with the head-tracking HMD built into the hood...

[Mike Dyne]

100Hz

100Hz gives me a headache. I hate the way people move on 100Hz TVs. I can't imagine this'll be any better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shutter glasses.

Since LCD tv's produce polarised images LCD shutter glasses don't work do they?

Anyone know if they work with oleds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re MrM - Thought it was just me!

"Now it all makes sense! i know a couple of people with large Samsung TV's and i keep thinking to myself that the way people move on screen just looks strange? I assume those sets are 120Hz!"

No, I think you will find that is the Supermarionation effect.

[John]

100Hz vs 120Hz

The 120Hz is used best in the US where its the lowest common multiple of 24 (film) and 60 (broadcast). A 60Hz TV does some nasty stuff called 3:2 pull-down on 24fps source. At 120Hz, it can show the same frame 5 times (or do some stupid SmoothMotionFlowMakeUpRandomFrames9000 processing) for 24fps or show the same frame twice for 60fps. According to the Wikipedia, 24fps movies in europe are broadcast at 25fps.

The annoying thing is, my PC doesn't depend on the frequency of the electricity supply, so why does modern TV have to?

And no more filmising! Sort out the lighting, optics and colour correction the same way film makers have to. Casualty used to be burn your eyes bright, now it's not just too dark, it's too blue! But to me, the main impact 24fps has on film is the techniques cinematographers have to use to work around the limitations of the low frame rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ JonB

'Shutter' glassess not polorised they alternate on off (black clear) @ 240Hz means 120 frames viewed per second per eye. Question is will the glassess cope? No tv does polorised images this is special two projector job only. ie theme park only.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shutter glasses.

Is there a type of shutter glass that's not LCD then?

I may be wrong here, but when they are clear you're looking through a piece of polaroid, when black the LCD is polarised against the polaroid layer and so you can't see through it...

Similarly the TV will have a polaroid layer, so the light coming from an LCD TV will be polarised, if that happens to be against the glass then you can't see whether on or off.

Maybe it's not a problem if both lenses are polarised the same way?

I'm happy to be proven wrong, I'd love to be able to use my shutter glasses again...

[Chris C]

Waste of power

Has anyone else thought of the extra power this thing is going to pull? If it needs to interpolate and create three new frames for every transmitted frame, then it's interpolating and creating at least 72 frames per second. That's likely going to take a good amount of processing, thus a good amount of power draw. I'm no "greeny", but I certainly don't want to increase my electric bill using a TV that will (in all likelihood) actually look worse than its predecessor.

[Anonymous from Mars]

0.017 second delay.

I call shenanigans. If something's running at 60 FPS, and it's doing some fancy transitional effects between frames to increase it to 240 FPS, that means it has to load the next frame before showing it, and then give us three useless frames.

0.017 second delay? Worthless. No thanks.

[Phil B]

CRT is the answer

What is all this nonsense about reducing motion blurring on LCD displays by playing about with the drive signal? LCD displays are simply incapable of displaying smooth motion video due to their rubbish refresh rates, irrespective of what drive you apply. A standard CRT TV displays sharper fast motion video than any current HD display LCD TV on the market. The answer is, therefore, that if you want to rid yourself of motion blurring, buy a CRT TV (you'll have to hurry though because there aren't many left). OLED displays might be the answer when they can make them last more than a couple of years.