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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

I think this varies a lot from person to person. I find the effect to be incredibly subtle - one of my monitors reset it self to 60hz a while back, and I didn't catch the problem for days.

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Scrolling text, I notice IMMEDIATELY

Sure, and maybe I'm odd, but I don't read text while scrolling. I stop scrolling and then read. So yes, if I just scroll up and down quickly I can see the refresh is different, but otherwise I don't notice it in my regular usage.

Plus we all grew up reading the 24fps text scroll in the Star Wars intro just fine. Until we convince a new generation of cinematographers to shoot in 120fps, it all seems a bit moot - even most digitally-authored content doesn't exceed 60fps (and tech people are the first to complain about things like the soap opera effect...)

There is a big difference between watxhing a movie and operating a device where your input makes things move on the screen, you notice the depay way more.

I find that watching something like a fast-pan in 24fps footage on a modern LCD is horrific. CRTs used to inherently smooth this sort of thing out, but now we get these harsh frame transitions. As much as the soap-opera-effect is maligned, a high refresh rate LCD needs some form of motion prediction for low frame rate content.

Yeah, which is why those TVs doing frame interpolation or whatever are beneficial for most people as long as they do it well. Even though AV pros might get annoyed at the fakeness.

The way frame rate work on conventional film vs. an LCD are completely different. It’s like trying to ask the bitrate of a Vinyl record.

Conventional film projectors don’t show each frame continuously, they transition the shutter blade smoothly between frames, and projectors often flash each one a couple of times (48 or 72hz). A cinema projector is going to demolish a LCD in smoothness and motion quality even if it technically has a higher refresh rate on paper.

Right, but we're mostly all watching 24 fps movies on LCDs. I don't have a cinema projector in my living room.

So when remastering from film, do they put each frame into the digital video and keep it 24 fps, or do they play the film and digitally record it at 60 fps to capture the projector effect?

Either way, DVDs were digital 29.97 fps at most.

Can you not literally see the frames skip as you move the mouse cursor across the screen? To me it’s OBVIOUS and excruciating and I’m only a light/casual gamer and use all my computers for work.

If I move my cursor slowly I can see the difference, I guess? But I don't habitually do that - I run with mouse/trackpad dialled to maximum acceleration, even at 120Hz there's a skip when you flick the cursor halfway across the screen. And I'm rarely scrolling a line at a time, I'm going page at a time.

I don't really get the obsession with smooth movement for desktop use (as opposed to gaming). Possibly this is a generational thing? Why is anyone intentionally using a computer primarily via slow analogue inputs?

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