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Comments: (83)

What Does 600 Hz Sub-field Motion Mean?

[Shop for a 600Hz plasma TV today at Amazon.com]

Many of the new plasma televisions from PanasonicSamsung, LG, and Insignia showing up online have a feature which says “600Hz subfield motion.”  This got me wondering what the hell it is.  I’m not the type to just read specs for a television and just accept it.  When doing my research I was able to find out exactly what it is and wanted to share that with everyone on the site.

This comes from Panasonic’s Canadian site:

A standard video signal is actually a series of still images, flashed on screen so quickly that we believe we are watching a moving image. The typical frame rate used in North America is 60 frames per second (60Hz) meaning that a TV would display 60 individual still images every second. Sub-field drive is the method used to flash the individual image elements (dots) on a plasma panel. For each frame displayed on the TV the Sub-field drive flashes the dots 10 times or more, meaning that the dots are flashing 600 times per second (600Hz) or more. (Example: 60 frames per second x 10 sub-fields = 600 flashes per second).

It all boils down to TV manufacturers using some science to trick our eyes into perceiving a better picture.  The television shows you the image at the same refresh rate but fires the individual pixels faster so the images appear smoother.

[Shop for a 600Hz plasma TV today at Amazon.com]


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  • francine219

    Let's see if I've got this! Does 600 hz in plasma actually equal 60 hz in LCD? Because I was told that we would not want a 60 hz tv when 120 hz is now the standard and 240 hz is even better! Let me know

    • Anonymous

      no plasma is the better way to go, especially for fast moving events

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  • Naebeth

    “The television shows you the image at the same refresh rate but fires the individual pixels faster so the images appear smoother.”
    To me, this makes no sense. How does refreshing a still image more make transition to the next still smoother? It still jumps from one still image to another in exactly the same the amount of time, in the same way. These two stills just take more electricity and computing power to display.
    Surely the only way to make the “images appear smoother” is to increase the frames per second, which we can't as it is set by the recorder/broadcaster.

  • Selivanow

    everyone should look here: http://www.best-3dtvs.com/guides/what-does-600hz-sub-field-drive-mean/ for an explination that make sense.

  • JBL71

    600 hz is 10 times 60 hz so it’s a bit better for fast motion. However most people will actually not see much difference past 120hz.

  • Nuclearjoe

    I was to understand that the Original Movies shot on film, were at 24 fps, not 30 fps, as on our old TV sets, which put two 30 fps images on the screen interleaving odd and even lines. When we got flat screens and we evolved the Improved Definition TV (IDTV) or High Definition TV (HDTV) technology (which gave us Picture-in-Picture (PIP), which was the non-displayed “from memory” image of the interleaved 60 fps TV display, which displayed all odd and even lines on the screen simultaneously, which turned the TV into true 60 fps screens), we had a problem viewing movies in “Real Time”, because 60 fps is not divisible evenly by 24 fps, but 120 fps was. We see 5 frames of a movie at 120 fps in “Real Time”. True 3D is recorded using a “Stereo” camera system, which uses 2 cameras, shot at the same time, one image for each eye. A single-eyed person can’t see in 3D. One method used on true 3D TVs, use “Shutter” glasses that open and close viewing shutters at a 120 fps rate, but the shutters are interleaved and synchronized with the 3D TV, so you only see the image in one eye at a time, which matches the image speed of the 3D TV’s interleaved 240 fps output. The left eye sees 120 fps and the right eye sees 120 fps, but they see the 3D TV image in the left-right-left-right eye sequence. This emulates how our eyes really see in 3D or stereo, so we can judge distance, which is the 3rd dimension.

    • http://www.americanrecordablemedia.com/ CD DVD Printer

      Thanks for explaining this up. I learned a lot from it.

  • Robrmb79

    nuclear joe has no idea what he is talking about. tv’s in europe run in PAL, which is 24 fps. In North America we use NTSC which js 29.97 fps.

    with ntsc, standard definition (old tv’s) a 480i signal was displayed at 29.97 fps. with this, the screen showed 60 images per second, hence 60hz. each frame was split into two images, one odd lines and one even lines. by refreshing at 60hz, the odd and even lines blend together into the 29.97fps and goes un-noticed.

    with high definition, we have multiple formats to discuss. 720p,1080i, and 1080p. the numbers in this discussion are not important since they refer to the ammount of lines displayed and have no effect on framerate. The difference is the “i” and “p”. i refers to the interlaced discussion as mentioned above with standard definition. with p or progressive, both odd and evenn lines are displayed simultaniously. what happens is the same image is displayed twice per frame to achieve 60hz refresh rate.

    with a broadcast signal running at 29.97 fps, the tv cannot display more than 29.97 full images per second. where you will see improvement on any tv boasting better refresh rate than 60hz is with any device that creates its own image and displays it more than 60fps. this would be computers and video game consolses that can calculate and render an image over 30fps itself.

    • Mal

      TVs in europe run in PAL which is 50Hz interlaced (or 25 full frames a second). To watch film on a PAL TV the must speed up the video AND audio by 4%, which increases the pitch by 2/3 of a musical note, making it both off-key and the wrong note. Like a mild version of alvin and the chipmunks for everything. This is true for all PAL DVDs but I believe with newer multisync PAL TVs and Blurays this has been overcome.

      Films are all 24fps. NTSC Video is 60Hz/30fps and PAL video is 50Hz/25fps. Nuclear Joe is mostly if not completely correct. The only purpose for 600Hz is to sync with PAL, NTSC, and Film without multi-sync. There are no 600FPS videos that I know of, and I highly doubt response times would allow for 600FPS anyway.

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