4K TVs Are Liars....On Frame Rates and Hertz
- Quincy Corsey
- Dec 10, 2020
- 3 min read
Call of Duty had their annual first-time tune for their newest edition of the franchise "Cold War" on Monday and boy was it an upgrade like never before in my eyes. When the game first came out it looked impressive but not to what I THOUGHT it was going to amount to with the Next-Gen Engine, 3.5 GHz (what makes your computer do good things fast), 8.9 Input/Output, and more. It was just OKAY...until Monday came and blew me out the water. The graphics were top of the line and physics just got upgraded out of nowhere but the greatest addition was the 120hz frame refresh that I didn't notice until then. However, it was a dream deferred because I have a 4K tv that CLAIMS to be at 120hz but it is truly only at 60hz. Why would the TCL, Samsung, VIZIO, or any other television manufacturer lie about their specs or just do the bare minimum instead of being straight up? Because they can and will do ANYTHING to make money on people like us who do not specialize in specs to know when we're getting got. Let me give you the lowdown on how we come to be everyday victims of electronic marketing, but before we do that let us start with "Frame Rates" and "Hertz".
When you are watching TV or playing games in High Definition you might see things as if they are in real-time and action in a crisp display with no chunky or blocky movement. This a smooth framerate, it is the action of making an almost seamless performance of your program or application you are using and it shows in everything you use. The iPhone X, for example, uses 60fps also known as Frames Per Second while 5 phones before that used only 30 fps. Yes, 1080p, with the p meaning "Progressive Scanning" shows your picture on a full screen. While anything else like the "i" or nothing was either having lines from bulbs being interlaced and gradually loading the image to better or worse resolution. Once 720p-1080p set the resolution standard it was all about how good were the frames on this resolution could look while on the screen.
Frame Rate:
Frame Rate became a big deal-breaker for people once we started using the HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) cord instead of the AV (Audio/Visual) cord to show resolution on DVD, cable, and video games alike. The potential was limitless even if this cord was only made in 2002. The times had to catch up with this invention for sure. In 1926 the end of silent films came to a close and frames were upgraded from 16-18 fps, because of hand-cranking being such an important tool in cinema at that time, into 24 fps. The Modern film uses 60 fps nowadays which is showing you the same image three times techinically for even smoother quality. There are now TVs that go beyond the status quo and give a frame rate of 120 fps but these are a fortune so TV companies use the 60 fps and now mix the rate of 60 Hz to make a "120 fps" that they claim. But hertz is a different story.
Hertz:
Hertz, named after the German Electromagnetism scientist Herman Hertz, is a unit of frequency for the electromagnetic field around us in waves of energy. The Hertz is a second of something like 100 Hz is 100 seconds or close to two minutes in cyclical standards. In TV and Media terms however it stands as the unit of how many times the picture is shown a still image and changed in a second. So if your TV is at 60hz; your image quality is going to be shown at that many times each second which will give a very nice quality and so on.
Fool Me One Time (Conclusion):
The TV companies that were named before are innovative and progressive in their nature and they are here to make better products than before. However, for us consumers, it is more than just seeing a shiny toy with good displays in the local Best Buy on a holiday weekend we are smarter now. Now that we have a better idea of what nerd stuff we do not know about can make a good tv cool and greater tv better let us make sure we don't get the okey-doke and let frames and electricity volume keep us from getting the best or worst in buying TVs. Lastly, and the most important thing you can take from this article is that just like an attractive man, woman, or even a transformer there is more than meets the eye when making a commitment.
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