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4K = Soap Opera? (1 Viewer)

Necros

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Thanks to Amazon's Prime Day we are the proud new owners of a 75" Samsung 4K TV. We got it sight unseen but it was too good of a deal to pass up. I'm pretty amazed by how crisp and clear everything is, just watching regular 1080p shows on cable TV. But most shows are just TOO clear. The lighter colors stand out more, and in many cases the backgrounds and sets look cheap, it almost looks like we're watching a brightly lit soap opera or a home movie someone shot with an iphone, only the details are super crisp and you can see every pore on a person's nose.

I've been messing around with the display settings, and noticed the colors were set to dynamic mode, and when I switched that to normal things got a little better. There's also a movie setting, but that seemed too dark.

Is there any way to get things to look "normal" again? Or is it something to do with how the TV upscales the 1080p signal to 4k? If we watch something in native 4k will it look better? Right now the only 4k source we have is on the tv's netflix app, most of the stuff we watch on netflix is still just regular HD though.
 

Tony Bensley

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Even up here in Canada, I'm noticing more "Budget" 4K TVs at Wal-Mart priced around $450- $600. As 3-D is realistically off the table with our budget constraints, and their apparent phasing out, I have no desire to only upgrade to 1080p whenever we're able to do so, if 4K proves a better, but still affordable option.

In short, I'd like to know whether my DVDs will at least look better than VHS does on our 32 inch 720p LCD Toshiba TV, or if 1080p would truly be a better choice for the playing of those. The device that we normally use for playing discs is a Samsung Blu-ray player. We really can't afford to upgrade to an Oppo or whatever device is best for upscaling.

CHEERS! :)
 

David Willow

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It took me a couple weeks of 'futzing', reading, learning, and futzing some more to get the picture the way I like it for non 4k content. I haven't tried any DVDs and all of the other content is 1080P, 1080i, or 720p. The couple SD channels I get I rarely watch so I can't say for sure how they look. I got it to the point where hockey looks great (especially when the PENS won again :dance: ). Baseball looks great and I assume football will too.

Don't expect a huge improvement over 1080p. There's no wow factor if you are not looking for it. The biggest thing I can say is the color/shadows appear much more realistic (with 4k content). Standard blurays look great as does 1080p content streamed from my Shield TV (via Plex).

If you are in the market for a smaller 40" or less it won't make much difference, IMO. However, the 40" 4K TV I picked up for the bedroom was only a couple hundred bucks and it really didn't make sense to me to get anything less.
 

jcroy

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How many progressive frames per second are current 4K tv screens able to do?

For example, if they're able to crank out 120 progressive frames per second, then an original 24fps movie would have each frame repeated five times. The soap opera effect is probably interpolating the movement in four out of every five frames.
 

Tony Bensley

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Realistically, I doubt that for 4K, there is anything under 40 inches. The smaller screens that I've seen displayed start at around 43 inches, which would be pushing it for our current entertainment center setup, although likely doable. Further complicating things, is that we do plan on moving in the near future, but as of today, nothing much is set in stone, other than the area of relocation. I might even have to part with some of my video collection, should space constraints in whatever living space we end up inhabiting prove to be an issue.

CHEERS! :)
 

Matt Hough

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I watched the 1953 Julius Caesar on my 4K OLED last night using my 4K player (which does wonderfully well with upscaling standard definition discs), and I have to say I was very, very pleased with the results. I didn't find it soft or artifact-plagued at all. I believe Samsungs do very well upconverting SD discs to HD, and if your new 4K TV has a decent scaler, it will take the 1080p signal from the player and take it the rest of the way to 4K.

But the source material needs to be well crafted to start with. No DVD with a poor encode is going to magically look great on a 4K set.
 

Mike Frezon

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You're right. The Vizio I got for the bedroom was 43". For some reason I thought it was smaller.

I can relate to THAT! I was in a store (Wal-Mart) tonight looking at their wall of TVs as my wife and I are thinking about a small display to mount in a room with some exercise gear. I was thinking of something really small, so I was at the end of the wall with the really small displays when I realized I was looking at the 32" displays.

Now, I had a 32" set until I got my 55" Panny plasma back in October 2012. Back then I thought the 32" set was probably about as big as I'd ever get. Now they look amazingly small. Tiny, in fact! [I noticed they also had some 24" displays in boxes underneath the wall of display models...but none of them even made it up on the wall!]
 

Tony Bensley

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You're right. The Vizio I got for the bedroom was 43". For some reason I thought it was smaller.
The 43" 4K LED TV that I saw at Wal-Mart was also a Vizio. I thought the display looked rather nice! :)

Will definitely be bypassing the 1080p displays when the time comes for an upgrade, if I have any say in the matter! ;)

CHEERS! :)
 

Tony Bensley

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I can relate to THAT! I was in a store (Wal-Mart) tonight looking at their wall of TVs as my wife and I are thinking about a small display to mount in a room with some exercise gear. I was thinking of something really small, so I was at the end of the wall with the really small displays when I realized I was looking at the 32" displays.

Now, I had a 32" set until I got my 55" Panny plasma back in October 2012. Back then I thought the 32" set was probably about as big as I'd ever get. Now they look amazingly small. Tiny, in fact! [I noticed they also had some 24" displays in boxes underneath the wall of display models...but none of them even made it up on the wall!]
That was the year we got our current 32" set, in the form of a 720p Toshiba LCD Flatscreen! Before that, we went through two 20" Toshiba CRT models (Both were still in working order when we got rid of those, about 4.5 years apart; first the 14 year old black monitor style set in the spring of 2008, and the 5 year old grey CRT in the fall of 2012!), plus my wife had an old 15-17" Color set (I think it was a Sears brand, or something along those lines?) for the upstairs before graduating to a 20" Sharp Flatscreen model (After using the Grey CRT Toshiba for about a year, or so, after which it went downstairs, where it stayed for over 4 years!) in 2008. That display looks pretty tiny to my eyes, these days!

CHEERS! :)
 

Necros

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Did you turn off the "motion blur" setting? That's the usual reason people see "soap opera effect"...

Yep, this was the problem. I did some more googling and found some more info too. I forget what Samsung called it, but it was some setting like that. Once I turned it off, it looked "normal" .. only problem is, She Who Must Be Obeyed got used to the soap opera look and likes it better now :( It's easy enough to switch back and forth though. It's kinda weird though, from a normal sitting distance, everything looks super detailed.. but when you get up close to the tv, it doesn't look detailed at all. There must be some crazy eye trickery going on.
 

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