A few months ago we reported on the new range of TVs that Sony released at the IFA tradeshow. One addition to the family was the Bravia Z4500 Motionflow which has a pretty nifty 200Hz frame rate. All well and good, but what on earth does that mean exactly?
To help get you up to speed with the latest in TV technology (and to get you sounding like a boffin the next time you want to impress the guys in IT) Sony have released a short video explaining what their Motionflow technology is all about.
Rather interestingly, the Marketing department have opted to demonstrate this huge advance in technology… by using a flick book.
Sounds a bit nutty at first, but the video shows that flick books with missing pages logically create a jerky scene, not unlike a standard TV when a particularly lively action shot is on. Standard TVs show 50 pictures per second, hence you seeing “50 hertz” written in small print on labels in the home entertainment section of Curry’s Digital.
That means that a 200hz telly shows (yes…) a pretty impressive 200 pictures per second- try doing that with a flip book without suffering thumb blisters. The technology does this by inserting transitional images to remove the stuttering effect that is visible in fast action sequences as the frame rate struggles to keep up.
I could go on with this impromptu computer engineering lesson, but a picture does speak a thousand words, or at least 200 every second.