How to turn off motion smoothing on your TV (or anyone else’s!)
As Shakespeare might have put it (but probably didn’t): Motion smoothing is known by many names, yet it’s just as much of a scourge no matter what you call it.
The technology, which rose to prominence with the advent of high-definition televisions in the mid-2000s, is a terrific demonstration of the adage that ignorance is bliss. If you know what motion smoothing is, there’s a good chance that it drives you mad every time you see it in action at your parents’ house, or at a local sports bar, or on the wall of TVs at Target. Meanwhile, normal people happily live their lives free of this mental prison, unaware that there’s anything wrong with what they’re seeing (perhaps because the feature is often enabled by default).
Not to worry: We’re here to help you save the day. Now, it’s probably not worth bringing this up at the pub — but if you’re spending time with family over the holidays, your uncle is presumably (somewhat) less likely to ask you to leave than your favorite bartender would be. So why not do everyone a favor and help them watch things As The Filmmakers Intended™?
Motion smoothing, which is also known as video interpolation or, more colloquially, the soap opera effect, is a post-processing technique applied by a television to video it’s displaying. The TV takes the video feed’s individual frames — of which there are typically 24 per second for movies, and 30 or 60 per second for TV broadcasts and streaming services — and artificially inserts extra frames between the existing ones. In doing so, it scales up the frame rate to match the screen’s native refresh rate of 60 Hz or 120 Hz. TVs use interpolation (i.e., they do math) to make educated guesses as to what the in-between frames should look like, and
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