Sitcoms and soap operas look the way they do because of lighting. I won't disagree that 24 fps has something to do with the 'film' look, but I think camera lens, filters, and lighting affect the look of the movie more then the framerate.
A friend recently picked-up an LED "3D" tv. Now, I always thought the 3D is a BS gimmick, and I still do, though I will conceed that it does work far better than I ever thought it would. Which is, not at all.
But the TV -- a samsung -- had a feature that reminds me a bit of up-converting, however it's used on every input, even 1080P from the blu ray. I googled it at the time but the gist is that it, on 2D mode, it computes deltas between frames and inserts new ones to make the image seem more fluid.
IT LOOKED LIKE TRASH!
It made everything look soap-opera or like a documentary. It messed up the depth of field. Sure, things were hyper-crisp but alarmingly so. It made it look cheap. Now, there's a setting buried in the control panel to tweak or disable that, but this is how it came from the factory, and i thought it was un-watchable.
So it's not merely lighting.
One last thought which is I actually think the perception of higher quality shots in films has a lot to do with stedicam which of course will be the same at 60fps. But that's just a guess.
It may look like trash, but--then again--so do upscaled images.
Your dissection of what is wrong with Samsung's interpolation had nothing whatsoever to do with seanalltogether's comment.
Now come back at me with some word-by-word, point-by-point dissection, but i'm done, this isn't worth it.
Absolutely preposterous. Depth of field is a function of lens focal length, aperture, and sensor size. There is no way that Samsung's TV could in any way effect the depth of field of the original recording. If it could, then it would be a magical motherfucking TV.
Because as much as you clearly know about film tech more than I do, you seem to be lacking a slight amount of common sense: What's happening there is processing of a digital signal. Specifically, the TV is creating frames for you to create the illusion of smoother video. And what this effect does, is it appears to flatten the shot.
What your slashdot-worthy post overlooks is that you're speaking from your limited knowledge of film. However, in this TV, there's a feature that lets you apply this setting to just half the screen, so you can see them both, side by side, and tweak as you wish.
Just like in life, there's no amount of theoretical education than can make-up for actually being there, for actually having hands-on.
So really, save the hyperbole.
This actually makes it more like a video game in which discreet images are generated from the world, instead of natural film/digital sensor in which millions of photons are captured for a short duration.