JVC Announces New High-Speed LCD TVs With 120Hz Refresh Rate  

This kind of sounds like that Philips technology.

It's a really cool idea, but I think they can definitly take it a step further. They should have their panels accepts 24fps signals, and then display it as 48 or 72fps video with interpolated frames.

This would create amazing smooth motion for movies that would also be jutter-free!

Interpolating is a general problem. The video processor has to do a lot of guessing and if it guesses wrong, there can be multitudes of artifacts. The external video processor manufacturers seem to think that technology isn't far enough for this purpose yet (I asked some of them about this). So I have my doubts whether doing interpolation today is a good idea. Philips' approach of inserting black frames in between sounds better. It can not introduce any artifacts - except eventually some flickering (hopefully not).

Sooner or later we'll probably have video processors which are clever enough to do good interpolation without any visible artifacts. But I don't expect this to come in the next 1-2 years. I'd love to be wrong, though! I also hope that video processing will in the future be able to smooth out movements in 24fps movies.

If enough 'future' frames are analyzed when you are doing the interpolation of previous frames, the I would disagree - you shouldn't really have many problems with the 'guesses'.

Obviously to do that however, you need to buffer the content a bit which can introduce lag. If you (or better yet, the TV itself) have the means to synch the audio, then I don't see this as a problem for movie and TV content.

You would want an easy way to turn the feature on an off though, as you don't want this 'on' for PC and game usage.

Ok, let's imagine we're watching some fireworks on TV. And let's imagine there's a ball flying through the image at the same time - in front of the fireworks. Now in frame 1 the ball is in the left part of the image. If the ball is flying really fast, it might be in the midst of the image already in frame 2 and on the right side of the image in frame 3. At the same time the fireworks looks different in each frame. Now how can a video processor "guess" a frame between frame 1 and 2? The VP would have to find out that there's ball flying from left to right. So the VP would have to place this ball in an intermediate position on the screen for the interpolated frame. But there's some part of the fireworks which was covered by the ball in frame 1 and another part of the fireworks covered by the ball in frame 3. Now the VP has to guess how the fireworks could look like in the intermediate frame. But there's lots of information missing about the fireworks, because big parts of it were covered by the ball.

Do you see what I mean? We humans with our intelligence would probably be able to create a good intermediate frame, but we'd have to use some guessing ourselves. A computer program (which is basically what a VP runs through) has a much much harder time doing such things, cause it has no real intelligence. The VP would have to understand every little bit that is happening on screen to be able to create good intermediate images. We humans know "oh, this is fireworks, this usually looks like this" and "oh, this is a building, when the fireworks flies there, the shadow of the building will likely change this way", but a VP doesn't have this kind of information.

Basically, there will be situations where the VP will not have enough information to create interpolated images that look good to our eyes/brain. There will be situations where some parts of the image are almost always covered, but shine through a bit, nevertheless. We humans will see some minor parts of covered things and know instantly what they are, which form they have and how they usually move. A VP doesn't recognize "well known objects" like this. It only sees pixels and geographical forms. A VP doesn't know how specific things usually move/behave.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought LCD's don't have a "refresh rate" per say...

They don't "repaint" the image as a CRT does. But there is a specific clock in which the LCD driver changes the screen content. This is somewhat similar to a "refresh rate". If you watch sports on your LCD, the picture changes 60 times per second. That would be the "refresh rate". JVC plans to draw 120 different pictures per second on their new LCDs. Philips instead draws 60 different pictures and one black frame in between each colored picture. So both displays have a refresh rate of 120Hz.

I was under the impression Pixel response time was more important and with current mid to high end sets, it isn't a issue anymore.
Isn't "interpolate" and "interlace" almost the same?

Response time is not really an issue, anymore. But the sample-and-hold effect still is. It's a whole different thing and has not much to do with response time.

No, that are 2 totally different things!