How to Turn Off the 'Soap Opera Effect' on Your New TV
There you are, beaming proudly at your beautiful new 95-inch HD television (or the even more modern Ultra HD television). You gather the family round, you hit the On button, call up a movie—and stare, horrified. Something’s weird and wrong with the picture. It looks like video instead of film, like it was shot with a camcorder. It looks like a soap opera.
Welcome to the “soap opera effect.” Almost all new TV sets exhibit it. It makes The Godfather look like General Hospital.
The TV companies think they’re doing you a favor. This electronic processing is supposed to eliminate the blurring of objects that move quickly across the screen. It does that by automatically generating new frames of video between the ones of the original film. That’s what makes the result look so bizarrely, unnaturally crispy.
If you burrow into your TV set’s menus, you won’t find anything to turn off called Soap Opera Effect—because that’s not what it’s called. Its name varies by manufacturer, but it usually includes the word Motion.
On Samsung TVs, it’s Auto Motion Plus. On LG sets, it’s called TruMotion. On Sony models, it’s MotionFlow.
In any case, that’s the setting to turn off to get your fluid cinematic look back again.
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Adapted from Pogue’s Basics, Flatiron Books. Order here.
