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How to Get Blu Rays to Not Look Awful on this Great TV
I replaced a 100" 1080p projector, which simply due to the size of the image, I am going to miss, but this TV is spectacular for the money, although being a cinephile, I'd like some more advanced picture settings, particularly the ability to turn off interpolation. Out of the box, regular 1080p blu rays look AWFUL, but that is fixable as I will get to shortly. I won't get into too much detail about the picture. There are other reviews for that here, and I agree with the positive ones, the picture is phenomenal for the price, but there is a bit of unevenness in the backlighting that only bothers me when the screen is mostly one color/shade.
The real reason I'm leaving this review is to tell you how to fix what, to me, was almost a deal-breaking picture issue when playing native 24p content. I was playing a brand new blu-ray on my PS4 (not a UHD blu ray), and like any cinephile should, I have my PS4 set to output 24p signal when available (most movie blu rays). This resulted in horrible artifacting during fast motion and panning, especially in dark scenes. (Legitimately awful, I was about to send it back, but decided to sleep on it.) After some research and fiddling with settings, I found that turning the 24p setting off on the PS4 mostly fixed this, but I wouldn't recommend that.
The best solution that I found was to enter the Expert Picture Settings menu (using the Roku app on your phone), and to turn Noise Reduction to Off. My guess is that since this TV has a native refresh rate of 60hz, it is doing a 3:2 pulldown on 24p signals and attempting to guess and add 36 frames every second between the original 24 (which is standard for 60hz TVs), but then the Noise Reduction is seeing a lot of those artificial frames as "noise" and trying to smooth them. This is probably what is causing the artifacting and ghosting during motion. You'd think the software would ignore the artificial frames that the TV itself generated when it comes to noise reduction, but that doesn't seem to be the case and the two functions collide into an absolutely unwatchable mess on screen.
Don't take my word for what looks best though. Try it yourself. Try it with just turning 24p off on your blu ray player. Try it with just turning Noise Reduction off. Try it with both. I liked it best with just Noise Reduction off, but everyone is different. I'll be honest, if I hadn't been able to resolve this, I would absolutely have sent the TV back and bought something with more advanced picture settings, albeit at a much higher expense. It was that bad.
Hopefully this helps you.
June 2017 · Electronics · verified purchase