Sony “Motionflow Impulse” reduces motion blur without interpolation

Posted Feb 19, 2013 by

Several new Sony HDTV’s can eliminate motion blur using “Motionflow Impulse“, a CRT-style strobe backlight that does not use interpolation! This mode is very video-game friendly, and completely eliminates motion blur during 60 fps @ 60 Hz. Try this setting with consoles, computers, emulators, and sports!

Supported Sony HDTV’s: HX920 Series, HX923 Series, HX925 Series, HX929 Series, XBR-55HX950, XBR-65HX950, KDL-47W802A (Budget), KDL-55w802A (Budget), KDL-55W900A, W905A Series, XBR-55X900A (4K Ultra), XBR-65X900A (4K Ultra)

The good news is that it has excellent motion clarity (similiar to LightBoost), and it retains the Sony color quality, with better-than-plasma video game motion on an LCD. It flickers like a 60Hz CRT, and add a very small amount of input lag (but less than interpolation).

TIP: Make sure you turn OFF the ambient light sensor to obtain a brighter picture during Sony Motionflow Impulse! This will prevent the TV from dimming the picture.

About Mark Rejhon

Also known as Chief Blur Buster. Founder of Blur Busters. Inventor of TestUFO. Read more about him on the About Mark page.

25 Comments For “Sony “Motionflow Impulse” reduces motion blur without interpolation”

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FallenServant
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FallenServant

Hi, when you say this is better than plasma are you including Panasonic 3D models? I did not see any hint of motion blur on the VT60 but if there is something better maybe I should cancel my order?

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10 years 8 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

Not necessarily, there are pros and cons.

Plasmas are great for movies and television. And they generally still have better color (unless we’re talking about outliers such as the now-discontinued “Elite”). If you were planning to use a plasma as a computer monitor for 90% computer use while sitting only 4 feet in front of it, and you’re worried about input lag, it’s worth considering switching your order to a carefully-chosen LCD. For the use case of computers, LCD usually better.

The Sony’s (with Motionflow Impulse) also happen to have very low input lag, making them great as “big” computer monitors, and with the bonus of a LightBoost-style strobe backlight which can be used during your 60fps@60Hz games with no motion blur. If you’ve never noticed motion blur (the type you see in motion animations at http://www.testufo.com/#test=photo and http://www.testufo.com/#test=eyetracking ) and can’t tell apart CRT from LCD, and isn’t picky about input lag, the other superior attributes of plasmas may outweigh its other drawbacks. Also, Motionflow Impulse does not benefit 30fps console gaming much (aka most console games), it only shines well during 60fps. Depends on the types of games you play, too!

What’s different today is that for motion blur, certain LCD recently leapfrogged plasma (for the case of nVidia’s LightBoost, and Sony’s Motionflow Impulse), but that doesn’t affect plasma’s generally superior color to LCD.

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10 years 8 months ago
xandre434
Member
xandre434

i can confirm that impulse mode exists on the much cheaper sony kdl-47w802a and kdl-55w802a models. in game mode, black frame insertion is the only motion setting available. this absolutely does eliminate sample and hold motion blur. the image is much darker, but i found i could crank up the settings to sufficiently for use in a light controlled room. as for the flickering, i can’t even tell in the slightest, but i did grow up on crts.

despite having none of the pesky sample and hold smudging, there is some slight ghosting in impulse mode. that is to say, in certain high contrast situations (pretty much only with vertical lines moving horizontally), i can see a single, faint trailing ghost image during fast motion. note that this doesn’t produce any visual blurring effect anywhere on the screen. the ghost is subtle enough that unless there is something like a vertical pole moving across a clear sky, or trees, or the edge of a wall, i can’t see any abnormalities. close inspection reveals that even these slight ghosts are perfectly sharp.

i ended up sending mine back because of some dead pixels, but now i’m trying to see if i can find something for a comparable price that might not exhibit any of this slight ghosting while inserting black frames (i forgot to mention that these artifacts seem limited to impulse mode).

so i guess i’m wondering if the effect is just because of the poor pixel response time of the set, or if it is just a side effect of black frame insertion. because if it is just an unavoidable side effect, then i must say that it’s by far the least of all the other evils i’ve encountered searching for a 60hz display, and that therefore sony’s bravia kdl led line with impulse is the best bet for anyone that cares about motion blur at 60hz.

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10 years 8 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

The faint-ghost effect is well known among LightBoost users, too. The faint-ghost double image is approximately the same intensity as 3D crosstalk. This is simply the remnant pixel transitions of the previous frame, that still aren’t complete, by the next time the backlight is strobed. This will continue to improve as LCD panels become faster. This faint-ghost effect is normal and cannot be avoided; and often is sometimes fainter than the phosphor trails on a CRT anyway.

A very good test for this type of ghosting is TestUFO’s Eiffel Tower Test (running in a supported web browser).

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10 years 8 months ago
Neo
Member
Neo

Shouldn’t this be referred to as a 60 fps @ 120 Hz mode? Similar to how the EIZO FG2421 Turbo240 120 fps @ 240Hz mode works? The black frame insertion would seem to take up some valuable response time. A better technique should just to strobe the backlight at 60 Hz and just repeat the frames, giving the diplay an extra 1/120th sec for lcd transitions.

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10 years 4 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

Impulse on several of the Sonys does not repeat frames, unlike other Motionflow modes. It is actually only 60fps at 60Hz on several of the Sony models. The strobing aims to get closer to Plasma motion quality without repeating refreshes. Strobing always adds about half a frame in input lag on average, since you have to wait for the LCD panel to finish refreshing in the dark, as seen in this high speed video of LightBoost at https://blurbusters.com/lightboost/video … Motionflow “Impulse” is doing the same.

In non-LightBoost mode, the top edge of the screen has less input lag than the bottom edge of the screeen, due to the scan effect. Even on CRTs. CRTs only have zero lag for the top edge. Now, when you strobe, the scan takes place unseen before the flash. The flash is all at once. So the input lag for both top and bottom edges of the screen is the same.

Impulse adds less than a full frame of input lag over non-Impulse, so that is already pretty good. Even 30ms total lag is less than most plasmas!

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10 years 4 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

The BFI in the online reviews can refer only to certian types of Motionflow.

Sometimes BFI is used simultaneously with motion interpolation. See existing technology. The problem is while BFI and strobing is okay for games/computers, the interpolation part isn’t. The online reviews that says that both is being done, are correct in this specific respect.

So we’re always on the hunt for motion-enhancing modes that don’t combine BFI (strobing) and interpolation, and just focuses on BFI (strobing) only. That’s what makes Motionflow Impulse so special — it’s the only Motionflow mode that is low input lag, which is necessary in order to be good for gaming.

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10 years 4 months ago
Neo
Member
Neo

Ahhh, ok. All the talk of BFI in online reviews was confusing. It would be nice if the MegaCorps would stop with the Marketing Gimmicks and just contribute to using open specifications so we can all know what they’re doing behind the scenes.

The mention of BFI, using a 120Hz panel, arose from the idea that the backlight could still be strobing at 120 Hz and the BFI simply hides it, but poorly thus the slight after-image.

I mentioned 24/30 fps because xandre434 never actually reported what the input source was. If it’s 3:2 pulldown 24 fps, 30 fps console or just a slower-than-60 fps pc source than that could explain a lot of the high-accutance after-images rather than just slowed lcd transition.

Finding the precise technical specs for these panels could help figure out what’s really going on.

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10 years 4 months ago
Neo
Member
Neo

Ooops forgot something.

What exactly is the input frame rate? If it’s less than 60 fps… 30 fps in console games and downsampled web video, 24 fps with film… shouldn’t that explain any multiple images? A system needs to be smart enough to only flash a frame once. That’s how black frame insertion at the source in game emulators work, right? Avoid sending a duplicate frame if the display can’t identify it as new or not?

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10 years 4 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

Correct, yes. Strobing multiple times on the same frame, if you are tracking your eyes, creates multiple images. 30fps at 60hz flicker creates a double image effect during eye tracking of fast motion.

Theoretically, yes 30hz strobe of 30fps is much clearer. However, a 30hz strobe would be a painfully awful. Also, variable rate strobing would be a huge engineering challenge, and would be extremely difficult to do without annoying side effects. It should theoretically be possible without major flicker effects when combined with G-SYNC, it is already written at http://www.blurbusters.com/faq/creating-strobe-backlight/#variablerefresh but it would not work well when built in only to a display without the GPU help to time the refreshes with arbitrary intervals between them.

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10 years 4 months ago
xandre434
Member
xandre434

my observations are confirmed by this review:

“The last three options increased motion resolution to 1080 lines. The “Impulse” mode uses backlight scanning/ black frame insertion techniques to “reset” our retinal persistence and improve the perceived clarity of moving objects. No interpolation is applied in this mode, so there’s no interpolation artefacts, but we did see some double edge ghosting on selected panning shots.”

i should also note:

1) very low input lag in game mode.
2) i almost gave up on my 47w802a because of the brightness/contrast drop in impulse mode. after fiddling with all the settings forever, it was just still too dim. surfing around all the menus as a last resort, i happened upon the power saving section , which wasn’t really where i’d expect it to be at all, and noticed that the freaking ambient light sensor was on by default. i turned this off and got more brightness/contrast that i need.

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10 years 8 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

Good tip! That needs to be more widely known.

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10 years 8 months ago
RuudBoek
Member
RuudBoek

I have some good news about the impulse mode on the sony 2013 KDL-55W905A.
The impulse mode is now available in gaming mode and the input lag in that impulse mode is only 30 ms!
The even better news is that it has been tested with the Leo Bodnar input lag tester, so a highspeed camera input lag test, will probably show 15 ms less.

So there you go, lightboost quality gaming that does not have the way too heavy 120fps requirement. The flickering is still there though.
Good chance that the same low input lag will be valid for the much cheaper Sony w805 as well.

Here is the review, the part about impulse mode is just above the Conclusion:

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/sony-kdl55w905a-201305172987.htm?page=Performance

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10 years 9 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

RuudBoek, that’s excellent news. Thanks for reporting on this.

This is good for people who want LightBoost-style gaming on a Sony HDTV.

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10 years 9 months ago
RuudBoek
Member
RuudBoek

It seems the Sony W6 series also have a similar option to impulse mode, but they named it “Led Motion”.

I think that is very interesting because you can currently get the 32 inch version of the W6 series for about 450 euro’s, so that brings that “impulse mode” a bit closer to prices of 120hz monitors.

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10 years 8 months ago
Mark Rejhon
Author
Mark Rejhon

Do you have an W6XX series? If so, can you test the W6 series with TestUFO — http://www.testufo.com

I am very interested in what numbers you’re able to achieve with the MPRT Test, http://www.testufo.com/#test=mprt
I’d love to see the differences between different Sony HDTV’s. The impulse length might be longer on the smaller models, which may make motion blur worse. Or it might be the same impulse length.

(Run these links in Chrome or another web browser that can do VSYNC)

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10 years 8 months ago
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William
11 years 1 month ago
Mark Rejhon
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Mark Rejhon

From William:
“It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d without a doubt donate to this fantastic blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to new updates and will share this blog with my”

Thanks very much for the compliment!

We don’t yet have a PayPal Donate button yet; that is coming. This has been 100% self-funded, also out of my free time for the last many months so far. (It’s an expensive hobby…!)

However… We now are an Amazon Affilate; there is now Amazon.com links for the monitors in the LightBoost HOWTO; Next time you want to buy a new computer hardware on Amazon, we’d appreciate it if you can click through our website to help pay for this blog’s cost.

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11 years 1 month ago
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