So, you just got a brand new TV, it's all set up and mounted, and you've just fired it up to have your mind blown with that excellent new-TV image. But something looks weird. Everything's hyperrealistic, almost like you're watching a home video or a bad soap opera. Don't panic, though.
What you're looking at is a common feature that many TV manufacturers have been building into TVs since around the time that 4K TVs came onto the scene. What you’re seeing goes by a few different names, included motion smoothing, motion compensation, or video interpolation, but is more commonly known as the Soap Opera Effect. The good news is, it’s easy to fix, and doing so can help you enjoy your favorite movies and TV shows as they were meant to be seen.
What is the Soap Opera Effect?
From the way people talk about it, you might think the Soap Opera Effect is a bug, but it’s actually a purpose-built feature found in many modern TVs. It goes by many names, as we’ll detail later, but we know the technology behind it as video interpolation, or more commonly, motion smoothing. A feature deliberately added to most modern TVs, it arose to solve a problem, not create one.
Unlike old CRT and plasma TVs, many modern TVs such as LED, LCD, OLED, and QLED displays have problems with motion blurring. Some are more sensitive to it than others, but when an TV has to display fast motion — quick-moving sports or video games, for example — the blur can be excessive, obscuring image detail. To help combat this problem, TV manufacturers started using displays with higher refresh rates, moving from the native 60Hz refresh rate used in older TVs to more modern 120Hz to 240Hz panels.
Since most sources of video — including broadcast and streaming — don’t stream at this frame rate, however, motion smoothing came along to “fake” a higher frame rate by inserting images in between the actual 30 or 60 frames per second that come from your cable box, game console, or antenna. It creates these new images when your TV analyzes the picture and digitally guesses at what new images it could insert. They even use this frame guessing game on some OLED and QLED TVs.
Motion smoothing works fine for sports programming and video games because of their methods of content recording and/or producing, but we’re used to seeing lower frame rates in many TV shows and movies, most of which are recorded at 24 frames per second. Therefore, people were unnerved watching The Hobbit at 48 frames per second as opposed to the 24 fps we’ve been seeing from film reels for decades and mimicked by digital cameras and projectors later on. Many people who saw the film thought it looked unnatural and frequently commented that it looked too real.
Sound familiar? Also, showing 24-fps content with frame interpolation for 120Hz displays messes with the cadence, as the display is adding frames that never existed. It is literally fake and removes the judder between frames we expect to see. That’s why it can be so annoying. That said, motion smoothing is not always a bad thing.
The benefits of motion smoothing
As mentioned above, motion smoothing can be great for sports and video games, as it leads to smoother-looking action. Even if the Soap Opera Effect bothers you (some people are more sensitive to it than others), you may well find it preferable for sports.
Motion smoothing doesn’t perturb everyone, and some people even like it for watching TV shows, depending on how they’re shot. There are even some people, rare though they may be, who prefer watching movies with motion smoothing turned on. Finally, there are people who notice nothing amiss. If you’re reading this article and wondering why you’ve never seen this so-called Soap Opera Effect, you may be one of them, and that’s OK too.
If you don’t notice motion smoothing, or if you prefer it, then there’s no harm in leaving it on. Motion smoothing doesn’t damage your eyes or anything like that (as much as those who hate it might believe otherwise). If you can’t stand it, here’s how to turn it off.
