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ryandrake • today at 3:04 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

> Having spent a couple decades working in and around digital video production tooling and engineering, as well as being a filmmaker and home theater enthusiast, it's worth mentioning that today almost all television image enhancement features are net negative

Yep, generally you don't want anything the TV manufacturer markets as "enhancements." They basically all add things to the signal that were not part of the director's or video editor's vision. Any cinephile will remind you that there is one correct setting for "brightness," "contrast," "color," and "tint". "Sharpness" should almost always be zero, and any other setting that claims to "enhance" the picture should be turned off for correct output.

The worst ones now are the "motion smoothing" modes that take your normal FPS movie and try to interpolate them up to 60FPS, 120FPS or even 240FPS, giving them that cheap, crappy "soap opera" effect. Turn it off as soon as you turn on your TV for the first time.


Replies

mcv • today at 6:47 AM

While this is generally true, there are some notorious cases where the director's intent was terrible, and the image definitely needs more contrast and brightness to see what's going on.

drfloyd51 • today at 4:10 AM

Mostly agreed. However, I find the motion smoothing works nice on my 30fps video games.

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