5 ms·

This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bass

by naz 5y ago

This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.

Gigachad 5y ago
For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing. You can even see some of this going on when you open the photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder and the final image.
Zircom 5y ago
I hate motion interpolation with a burning passion and have made it into practically a vendetta and will turn it off anywhere I see it by any means necessary, including downloading a remote application onto my phone and using the IR blaster to turn it off in restaurants and waking up in the middle of the night at friends houses to sneakily switch it off.
- tartoran 5y ago
  For whoever what motion interpolation is also known as is the soap opera effect on movies and I agree, it looks terrible but most people don’t get it, it doesn’t bother them at all.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    For me personally, 24fps is extremely close to being unable to perceive motion, and in many movies I absolutely can't see the content. Any pan in a movie is something where my mind absolutely is unable to process the motion and I become unable to see anything at all. With motion interpolation on, I can actually tell what's happening in an action scene.
  - copperx 5y ago
    According to some neuroscience article that was posted in HN recently, some people might percieve reality in "less FPS." Not only that, but as people age, the speed also goes down. Most people I know cannot discern the difference between heavy motion interpolation and it being off. In the same way, I remember when people weren't able to discern between DVD and BluRay quality in 1080p displays. Even today, many people can't see the difference between a Retina display and a 1080p monitor, which blows my mind.
    - vbezhenar 5y ago
      I did blind testing on myself and found out that I couldn’t see a difference between 72 and 144 FPS.
Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
Gimmicks? Something that a company needs to invent to keep selling new versions of their product.
bcrosby95 5y ago
It's common in pretty much anything targeted towards the masses. It's probably best to think about it in terms of food. Your average person has an "unrefined" palate. Be it for food, drink, art, etc. I think everyone has one of these in some areas of life. You can't be a connoisseur in every field - it takes too much energy.
laumars 5y ago
I’ve never owned Bose nor Beats specifically but more generally I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers. With room sized speakers it’s not a problem because you’ll have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some subs too. Thus it’s easy to have a rich low end without sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with headphones that’s much harder to pull off. So you either have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still still producing a rich and deep low end is very much desirable.
- Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
  > I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality. Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for my mood/taste. Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You can do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening. However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?) reason is a bit unusual.
  - laumars 5y ago
    > However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. I’ve done a lot of research on this as a recording artist myself and what you’re saying here is a misunderstood meme. Eg Half the records released before 80s have been remastered to sound different to what the musicians originally recorded. Plus any medium adds colour, vinyl adds warmth to the playback, digital formats (unless you’re using lossless, which most people don’t) add artifecting, etc. Songs are often written for their preferred medium. So there isn’t really an exact “as intended” but rather a broader “Goldilocks zone” (for want a better term). This is especially true if you listen to a broad variety of genres. You’ll also find that most songs record in the last 20 years will be compressed to hell and back so they sound good regardless of how shitty the sound systems are in peoples homes and cars. This isn’t an artistic decision, it’s what producers and sound engineers do to make records sound good for the lowest common denominator. It’s also part of the reason why live music sound better (if the gig or club has a half decent sound engineer anyway). > Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. Some content is actually deficient in some spectrums due to the limitations of the media or technologies of the era. Those limitations were intended to be compensated by speakers that added that colour. There’s a reason why studio monitors with zero frequency curve are less common to for rock fans than acoustic speakers (for example). Lastly it’s also worth noting that not everyone’s ears hear spectrums equally. Our ears don’t have a zero frequency curve and that curve will differ from person to person. Which is why some of the best headphones out there are ones that profile your hearing and then perform post processing on the music based on your hearing profile.
jiggawatts 5y ago
Taste. It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers. Random examples: - In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their music up to 11, to the point that it's horrendously distorted, causes physical pain, and forces everyone to scream at the top of their lungs to be heard. - Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices. - Just look at the typical gaming PC market. RGB LEDs are now almost "essential", despite adding nothing material to the performance or capability of the system other than a garish blinken-light-show. You can't see the gigahertz, but you sure can see the LEDs! - Cars are perceived to be more sporty if they have a loud exhaust with a deep note to it. So of course, every "sports" car has literal fake exhaust that's "tuned" to make this particular noise. Etc, etc... It's all down to bad taste.
- anonymouse008 5y ago
  Hearing this and Steve Jobs’ critique of Microsoft, “they have no taste” is stunning. Taking the iPhone as the mass consumer computer, must mean that as a computing device the iPhone has very little taste… Which in a sense I can definitely see…
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    iPhones are definitely aimed at the more discerning, up-market customer. Android meanwhile is for the mass-market. iPhones have four levels of encryption designed to thwart the likes of the FBI trying to get data out of your confiscated phones. Androids have a checkbox tick that basically says "Encryption: Yes". iPhones have 1000-nit OLED HDR screens that are colour-managed and calibrated out of the box, and have Dolby Vision HDR system-wide. Etc, etc... iPhones are for people that actually care about their privacy, aren't blind, and appreciate the "small touches". Androids are for people that don't mind factory-installed crapware, as long as it's cheap.
formerly_proven 5y ago
The pendulum seems to be coming back on that one with the "Filmmaker Mode" and all that.

by naz 5y ago

This is so common in consumer tech. Is there a name for it? Like how any new TV has horrible motion interpolation and sharpening enabled by default, or the bassiness of Bose/Beats headphones.

Gigachad 5y ago

For a camera it would just be referred to as post processing. You can even see some of this going on when you open the photo immediately after taking it and see it snap in to high quality later. Or the difference between the live viewfinder and the final image.

Zircom 5y ago

I hate motion interpolation with a burning passion and have made it into practically a vendetta and will turn it off anywhere I see it by any means necessary, including downloading a remote application onto my phone and using the IR blaster to turn it off in restaurants and waking up in the middle of the night at friends houses to sneakily switch it off.

tartoran 5y ago
For whoever what motion interpolation is also known as is the soap opera effect on movies and I agree, it looks terrible but most people don’t get it, it doesn’t bother them at all.
- kuschku 5y ago
  For me personally, 24fps is extremely close to being unable to perceive motion, and in many movies I absolutely can't see the content. Any pan in a movie is something where my mind absolutely is unable to process the motion and I become unable to see anything at all. With motion interpolation on, I can actually tell what's happening in an action scene.
- copperx 5y ago
  According to some neuroscience article that was posted in HN recently, some people might percieve reality in "less FPS." Not only that, but as people age, the speed also goes down. Most people I know cannot discern the difference between heavy motion interpolation and it being off. In the same way, I remember when people weren't able to discern between DVD and BluRay quality in 1080p displays. Even today, many people can't see the difference between a Retina display and a 1080p monitor, which blows my mind.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    I did blind testing on myself and found out that I couldn’t see a difference between 72 and 144 FPS.

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago

Gimmicks? Something that a company needs to invent to keep selling new versions of their product.

bcrosby95 5y ago

It's common in pretty much anything targeted towards the masses. It's probably best to think about it in terms of food. Your average person has an "unrefined" palate. Be it for food, drink, art, etc. I think everyone has one of these in some areas of life. You can't be a connoisseur in every field - it takes too much energy.

laumars 5y ago

I’ve never owned Bose nor Beats specifically but more generally I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers. With room sized speakers it’s not a problem because you’ll have multiple cones dedicated to the low end and usually some subs too. Thus it’s easy to have a rich low end without sacrificing the fidelity of the higher end. But with headphones that’s much harder to pull off. So you either have a flatter sound or a muffled high end. Thus having headphones that can have a super crisp top end while still still producing a rich and deep low end is very much desirable.

Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
> I find bassiness is a desirable feature rather than a gimmick for dumb consumers It's perfectly reasonable to find bass a desirable quality. Depending on my mood I'll listen to music with lots of bass, or with little bass. However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. Instead I'll just listen to appropriate music for my mood/taste. Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. You can do it, and there are reasons why you might want to do it temporarily e.g. blue light filtering in the evening. However, doing so permanently without a specific (medical?) reason is a bit unusual.
- laumars 5y ago
  > However, I've zero desire to intentionally alter the frequency response so I'm hearing something different than the musicians and mixing engineer intended. I’ve done a lot of research on this as a recording artist myself and what you’re saying here is a misunderstood meme. Eg Half the records released before 80s have been remastered to sound different to what the musicians originally recorded. Plus any medium adds colour, vinyl adds warmth to the playback, digital formats (unless you’re using lossless, which most people don’t) add artifecting, etc. Songs are often written for their preferred medium. So there isn’t really an exact “as intended” but rather a broader “Goldilocks zone” (for want a better term). This is especially true if you listen to a broad variety of genres. You’ll also find that most songs record in the last 20 years will be compressed to hell and back so they sound good regardless of how shitty the sound systems are in peoples homes and cars. This isn’t an artistic decision, it’s what producers and sound engineers do to make records sound good for the lowest common denominator. It’s also part of the reason why live music sound better (if the gig or club has a half decent sound engineer anyway). > Intentionally having a non-flat frequency response is equivalent to adjusting the colour space / colour grading of your monitor to not accurately represent colours. Some content is actually deficient in some spectrums due to the limitations of the media or technologies of the era. Those limitations were intended to be compensated by speakers that added that colour. There’s a reason why studio monitors with zero frequency curve are less common to for rock fans than acoustic speakers (for example). Lastly it’s also worth noting that not everyone’s ears hear spectrums equally. Our ears don’t have a zero frequency curve and that curve will differ from person to person. Which is why some of the best headphones out there are ones that profile your hearing and then perform post processing on the music based on your hearing profile.

jiggawatts 5y ago

Taste. It takes time and experience to develop, and the masses on average don't have it. As in, they might have developed taste for a few products, but not most products. Hence, the mass-market products are aimed at people with no taste, because that captures the largest slice of the consumers. Random examples: - In A/B tests, the typical personal will rate louder music as better. Hence, all bars and pubs turn their music up to 11, to the point that it's horrendously distorted, causes physical pain, and forces everyone to scream at the top of their lungs to be heard. - Sugary, salty and fatty foods are consistently rated by typical people as more tasty than foods without them. Hence, all fast-food restaurants load their foods up with those elements instead of more expensive flavourings such as herbs and spices. - Just look at the typical gaming PC market. RGB LEDs are now almost "essential", despite adding nothing material to the performance or capability of the system other than a garish blinken-light-show. You can't see the gigahertz, but you sure can see the LEDs! - Cars are perceived to be more sporty if they have a loud exhaust with a deep note to it. So of course, every "sports" car has literal fake exhaust that's "tuned" to make this particular noise. Etc, etc... It's all down to bad taste.

anonymouse008 5y ago
Hearing this and Steve Jobs’ critique of Microsoft, “they have no taste” is stunning. Taking the iPhone as the mass consumer computer, must mean that as a computing device the iPhone has very little taste… Which in a sense I can definitely see…
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  iPhones are definitely aimed at the more discerning, up-market customer. Android meanwhile is for the mass-market. iPhones have four levels of encryption designed to thwart the likes of the FBI trying to get data out of your confiscated phones. Androids have a checkbox tick that basically says "Encryption: Yes". iPhones have 1000-nit OLED HDR screens that are colour-managed and calibrated out of the box, and have Dolby Vision HDR system-wide. Etc, etc... iPhones are for people that actually care about their privacy, aren't blind, and appreciate the "small touches". Androids are for people that don't mind factory-installed crapware, as long as it's cheap.

formerly_proven 5y ago

The pendulum seems to be coming back on that one with the "Filmmaker Mode" and all that.