Plasma tvs without smooth motion

Look for two things on your new TV:

1. A 120Hz refresh rate, or a multiple thereof. 120Hz is integer divisible by the 24fps film standard, so the electronics that make the higher refresh rate will be more compatible with film than sets with the base 60Hz refresh rate.

2. Film Mode. This is pretty standard on most HD TVs, but it doesn't hurt to check, especially because the same term is used to describe two or more very different functions.

-A- If your video source is a video DVD, the movie will be encoded to NTSC video (I'm assuming by your handle that you're in Mexico) by a process called telecine, which uses pulldown to take care of the difference between the 24fps frame rate of film and the ~30 frames (~60 fields) per second of NTSC video. Some sets like my Samsung use "film mode" to do further processing on the NTSC video to try to fix timebase errors that are inherent in the telecine process. Note that for Samsung sets, Film Mode is not active for HD content. You might want to check to see what "Film Mode" really means for the set that you buy.

-B- If your video source is Blu-ray discs, then you're stuck with the native 24fps of film, which would be great if there was no raster scanning. But because of raster scanning, a 24 frame per second video signal can look even worse than a movie processed with pulldown to the native refresh rate of the TV. One way to combat this is by setting the TV to a multiple of 24Hz to match the native frame rate of the film. According to people on the Internet (with all of the trust that you should put into that), some TV sets actually do switch between TV refresh rates of 30 or 60 Hz and 48 or 72Hz for film. (In movie theaters they flash the same frame 2 or 3 times to eliminate flicker, giving an effective frame rate of 48 or 72fps. The TV needs to do something similar.) If you're planning on watching a lot of Blu-ray movies, you might want to check that feature out, and see for yourself if it's any better than a 120Hz refresh rate for watching movies.

Why do you make of samsungs?

Why do you make of samsungs?

I'm using a Samsung right now. It's a 120Hz LED model. The Samsung is a replacement for a Sony that I originally had. When the Sony got broken, I decided to use the opportunity to try another brand. I chose Samsung because they OEM more LCD panels (at least that was the case in 2011) than any other manufacturer, and IME the OEM that sells whole products under its own brand name tends to save the best components for those products. I honestly can't say for sure if that strategy paid off for me this time, but I can't find a single bad pixel on the whole screen.

My older (2011) model has the Smart Hub, and from time to time I use it to view content from a computer with a DLNA server on it. It looks like they've added lots of CPU power to some of the current models if you're into that sort of thing. Since Samsung still doesn't support Amazon, I'm still not going to turn my Roku off, but for virtually everything else it's a nice thing to have if you don't already own outboard boxes that do the same thing.

The "Film Mode" setting on Samsung TV sets apparently is only for SD content. Other features like Auto Motion Plus and LED Motion Plus give plenty of fine grained control over how much (or how little) processing is done to correct the strobing and motion judder inherent in 24fps material. I personally want to make shot-on-film content look better, but this set does allow everything to be shut off for the "film look is kewl" crowd.

My set is far from the top of the line, and it includes lots of features such as test pattern generator and single color operation that I used to only expect in a costly pro video monitor. There are plenty of picture adjustments there for the engineer to take advantage of. And if you're not an engineer, setting everything to "Standard" yields a pretty nice picture.

One "green" feature that I have a love/hate relationship with is the one that tries to automatically adjust the backlighting to match the room lighting. Every once in a while it's not very smooth, and the sudden dips in brightness can be annoying. But this too can be set to manual mode if you like.

Whenever I replace this one, I'm probably going to look at Samsung again.