By Martin Vedris
SYDNEY: As Sony Australia prepares to launch its new 200 Hz TV, the Z5500, which will be available in sizes of 52, 46 and 40-inch, with an expected RRP of around $5,199 for the 52-inch, the company said 200 Hz is now a case of buyer be aware.
If white’s the new black, then 200 Hz is the new 100 Hz, but Sony said that the difference between 200 Hz technologies is black and white.
“If you take a look at a lot of the first generation 200 Hz technologies out there on the market its actually quite easy to see,” said Sony Australia’s senior product specialist – Audio Visual, Craig Jackson, referring to artifacts in the image.
“The easiest way to spot those [artifacts] is to look for areas of high contrast, such as black on white, and anything moving up and down.
“That’s actually the big difference between second generation 200 Hz, which is ours, and just first generation 200 Hz, which is where others in the industry are getting up to at the moment.
“We’ve had the ability now to fine tune our processing and all of our noise reduction and our image blur reduction and all the things that don’t have the fancy names that are the things which do all the grunt work inside the TV.”
The more frames you have every second, the smoother the motion is going to look, but since 200 Hz requires inserting 150 frames a second from a source signal of 50 Hz, Jackson says that creating an artifact-free image requires significant processor strength.
“All of our MotionFlow technologies actually create frames that don’t exist,” said Jackson. “They look at the source data and take the frames and draw the next frame. So if you have only 50 original frames [a second] you’ve then got 150 frames that the television has to go and draw itself every second and that’s where it would be easy for a lot of televisions with slower or cheaper processors to throw out a lot of artifacting.”