Wyatt21
Member
With 120Hz, 240Hz, and even 600Hz, refresh rate gets a lot of attention in the marketing of new HDTVs.
Television is a series of images, shown rapidly enough that your brain sees it as motion.
In the U.S., our electricity runs at 60Hz, so it's only natural that our TVs run at the same rate (elsewhere, 50Hz is common). This is largely a holdover from the CRT days, but our entire system is based on it, so there's no use changing it.
Original video frames (1 and 2) at 60 frames per second aren't enough to fill 120Hz and 240Hz LCDs. Duplicating the original frames is one method. Alternately, frames can be interpolated to fill the gaps. In this example, the TV's processor creates frame 1a from the difference between 1 and 2. This (along with 2a, 3a, etc.) makes up the difference between 60Hz video and 120Hz TVs.
With 120Hz, 240Hz, and even 600Hz, refresh rate gets a lot of attention in the marketing of new HDTVs.
Refresh rate is how often the TV shows a new image. Anything above 60Hz is entirely the invention of the TV itself. All modern video is either 24 frames per second (movies and most TV shows), 60 fields per second (1080i video), or 60 frames per second (720p video). Higher refresh rates are used to increase apparent motion resolution with LCDs. The 600Hz with plasmas is largely marketing, but is technically how they work.
If you're annoyed by motion blur, you're better off getting the highest-refresh-rate LCD you can get, or stick with plasma (or OLED). Though it's worth mentioning that sometimes the processing that allows high refresh rate TV to work can cause input lag.
And most important, because your source is 24 or 60fps, you do not need special HDMI cables with a 120 or 240Hz TV. If the salesperson tells you that, he or she is either clueless or lying.
Television is a series of images, shown rapidly enough that your brain sees it as motion.
In the U.S., our electricity runs at 60Hz, so it's only natural that our TVs run at the same rate (elsewhere, 50Hz is common). This is largely a holdover from the CRT days, but our entire system is based on it, so there's no use changing it.
Original video frames (1 and 2) at 60 frames per second aren't enough to fill 120Hz and 240Hz LCDs. Duplicating the original frames is one method. Alternately, frames can be interpolated to fill the gaps. In this example, the TV's processor creates frame 1a from the difference between 1 and 2. This (along with 2a, 3a, etc.) makes up the difference between 60Hz video and 120Hz TVs.
With 120Hz, 240Hz, and even 600Hz, refresh rate gets a lot of attention in the marketing of new HDTVs.
Refresh rate is how often the TV shows a new image. Anything above 60Hz is entirely the invention of the TV itself. All modern video is either 24 frames per second (movies and most TV shows), 60 fields per second (1080i video), or 60 frames per second (720p video). Higher refresh rates are used to increase apparent motion resolution with LCDs. The 600Hz with plasmas is largely marketing, but is technically how they work.
If you're annoyed by motion blur, you're better off getting the highest-refresh-rate LCD you can get, or stick with plasma (or OLED). Though it's worth mentioning that sometimes the processing that allows high refresh rate TV to work can cause input lag.
And most important, because your source is 24 or 60fps, you do not need special HDMI cables with a 120 or 240Hz TV. If the salesperson tells you that, he or she is either clueless or lying.
