When Amy and I finished college, her mother and sister graciously decided to purchase an extremely nice television as a graduation present.

I’ve never had a really nice television.  And since I’m picky about picture quality and intended to keep this TV for a good long while, I wanted to have some say in what we got.  So the four of us went down to Costco to pick one out.

Now, I don’t want to get too technical, but there are a shocking number of television options these days.  LED, LCD, plasma — all work differently and all have pros and cons.

After about an hour of watching Spider Man 2 play on a hundred different televisions, we finally settled on one that was perfect in every way.

Except one.

One of the problems with LCD televisions is their handling of motion.  Specifically: they stutter, because the refresh rate of the pixels isn’t sufficient to handle really fast things flying across the screen.

To compensate for this, all new LCD TVs operate at 120 Hz, which means the screen refreshes 120 times per second.  This isn’t inherently a problem (the more the better, right?), but an issue develops when you take what you’re watching into account.

Film is shot at 24 frames per second (which effectively translates to 24 Hz — not exactly the same thing, but the comparison will do for our purposes).  Video is shot mostly at 30 frames per second.  Televisions are interlaced, which means the even and odd fields refresh alternately, creating effectively a 60 Hz cycle on a TV.  Broadcast TV works on this cycle.

Now, when you change up the frames per second, you have to do a conversion.  If you’re watching a DVD that’s meant to be seen at 60 Hz and you’re watching it at 120 Hz (as we were on this TV we were about to purchase), the technology inside the television effectively creates a frame in between every frame.  It blends two frames to create a new frame in between them.

And this looks like bullshit.  There’s no other way to say it — it makes anything you watch look like a video game.  Everything looks too smooth, too sharp, and decidedly digital.

So I had a very simple question for the Costco employee that was helping us:

“Can you turn it off?”

“Why would you want to do that?” he replied.

“It looks bad.  Everything looks too clean, it’s too digital.”

“I mean, you can,” he said, “but come here, let me show you what happens when you turn it off.”  He lead me to another TV, fiddled with the settings for a minute, and then took a step back.

Spider Man 2 now looked amazing.  Just like a film print.

“See?” he spat, disgust in his voice unmistakeable, “now it looks like a movie theater.”

And suddenly I felt very, very old.