MOTION SMOOTHING or "soap opera mode" on HDTV

This was on a TV at a friend's house we were borrowing for a week. I can... see the appeal. My extensive test suite of Alien and Columbo looked super sharp, like they'd been shot in HD digital. It did have a weird soap-opera feel; I think this was because it looked ultra-real, as though you could step through the screen into the image, as distinct from the warm fuzzy glow of old celluloid. I found it off-putting because it wasn't what I expected and I eventually turned it off but I'm sure there are people who either don't notice or actually think it looks great.

I can... see the appeal

mods pls delete this

sorry i'm a libra

Stayed at an airbnb on the south coast last week and watched Children of Men one night on their big wall-mounted LG telly. We paused it twice to try and lose the high-framerate digital video look and couldn't quite do it*. It seemed to be buried in the LG menus; you'd have thought "Movie" mode alone would be sufficient, but not really. The next day I found "Expert Mode", which had low- and high-ambient light presets and the former looked better for film. But nothing explicitly seemed to allow you to defeat the motion smoothing.

(* - this is where someone tells me that Cuaron filmed CoM on HDV at 50fps and it's supposed to look like that)

And then I watched a 1970s episode of On The Buses on ITV3 and that looked like 320x240 early-'00s toycam footage blown up. I'll get you Butler!

We have an LG and you can turn off motion smoothing for TV and DVDs, but not for stuff playing off a USB -- not sure if thAt was how you were watching

No, it was streaming (can't recall if it was Amazon or Netflix)... we did find a website that described various TruMotion options on LG models, but we couldn't find that menu option at the top-level. Looks like you need to drill down a bit to tweak that? I think I did find it the next day (on or off, no de-blur or de-judder sliders) but, by then, I just wanted to leave the TV the way we found it. Like The Young Doctors On Acid.

(* - this is where someone tells me that Cuaron filmed CoM on HDV at 50fps and it's supposed to look like that)

No, Cuaron designed CoM to look actually good.

We just got a 4K LG set and, after seeing firsthand the horrors of “motion smoothing” I immediately went through the settings and switched off all of these features (I used MatthewK’s post from last year as a guide). Regular TV (inc. movies on TCM and whatnot) now looks fantastic, but even after changing everything, when I tried to watch the last two episodes of Russian Doll on Netflix, it still looks disgusting (my husband reports the same problem with The Crown). Anyone know if Netflix—or Prime, for that matter—has its own settings that my tv can’t override? I couldn’t find anything in my quick perusal of the Netflix menu.

Are you using an app built into the TV, or e.g. an Apple TV to watch? There’s a setting on the latter to show things at their original frame rate - can’t remember exactly but it’s something like “match frame rate” or similar. An app on the TV might have a similar setting. Not sure if Netflix upsamples frame rates prior to streaming, but I’d imagine a few people would be pissed off and vocal about it if they did.

That fixed it! I had been watching it through the Netflix app on my TV, but after accessing Netflix through my PVR receiver, it finally looked right. Thanks a bunch!

With LGs, I haven't found a way to turn off motion smoothing for stuff coming off the USB drives, which is annoying.

xp so glad to help, why do manufacturers do this to us? Save us, Tom Cruise.

still a plague

It's not going anywhere, unfortunately

Had to go through four sub-menus to turn this shit off on my mom's new TV.

I had to watch an intensely bright and motion smoothed Gremlins one Christmas, you could see the pudding-y consistency of the fake snow at the beginning. It was more horrific than a pureed gremlin.

Do people actually <i>enjoy</i> watching television like this, or is it more of a case of them getting a 4k TV and that being the default setting (so it must be <i>better</i>)?

(ugh, me and coding)

it's def the default setting phenomenon, my parents do this and I'm like "wtf why does this look like CCTV"

I guess it somehow makes the display stuff they play in them at the store look better?

My tv (LG) allows me to gauge how much motion smoothing I want to see. I can go full soap opera, or I can dial it back to almost none, but just enough to make old shows and films look modern-ish (crisp visuals and less grain/noise in the footage). I don't watch anything through USB, so I don't know if my LG has the same issues James Morrison's does. I like having the option for a little or a lot.

Also, none. I can turn it off altogether, but I generally don't.

it's weird how many people I know that don't even know it's a setting, like even my brother has been like "I don't notice anything!"

I guess it's ok for sports?

I went "full austerity" on my Sony OLED but I had to back it off a skosh because it was a bit *too* hairshirt. Still the most "film" TV I have ever owned, I skipped LCD altogether and held on to my ageing plasma until I found a decent OLED on clearance.

i want an OLED so bad, to replace my 2006 toshiba, but 43” is the max i can put in my living room and they just don’t make em that small. there are some 48-inchers coming this year, which is the smallest they’ve ever gotten.

Some of them you can size up because the bezels are smaller - I had a 51" plasma but the 55" OLED is the same dimensions, just a smaller edge around the screen.

I am definitely on tenterhooks waiting for Smaller OLED TVs