…

When this TV arrived (and it’s so freakin’ big I had to go buy a new table for it), I was at first mystified by how strange the picture quality is. The resolution and contrast are even better than I expected, but the first Blu-Ray disk I put in was “Fellowship of the Ring”, and for some reason, it looked more like the hideous high frame rate video of “The Hobbit”, not the 24 frame per second film look of the LOTR movies. And indeed, at the top of the screen, the frame rate was shown as 60p, which is to me a bit unusual, given the 24fps source material. Unlike the Sony Bravia I’m replacing, there’s no way to control the frame rate directly, and among the reviews here on Amazon, I couldn’t find any way to get rid of this artificial motion blur-less look that I find so very wrong.

Finally on the Samsung site I found there’s a setting called Auto Motion Plus on one of the sub-menus. The TV actually tries to create “in-between frames”, to achieve an actual (though crappy) 60 frames per second picture. The default setting is Auto. Since I don’t see it mentioned here, it horrifies me to think that probably everyone who owns this TV is operating it with Auto Motion Plus, because it really is the Death of Cinema. But I beg you, unless you only watch sports, heed my words and run, don’t walk, to this menu setting.