THX Certified HDTVs

Anandtech has posted an article on THX Certified HDTVs, and asks the question “Is this really useful, or is it just THX selling their logo to make money for themselves?” After reading through the article, my take away from it is that it does make a difference, but that it comes with a cost. It seems that when THX mode is enabled, the image does look stunning, but that many advanced options that are available on the TV are disabled. For example, the following quote comes from the article:

Then you run into quirky behavior driven by the HDTV company’s need to compete on specsmanship. High refresh rates are a good example of this. You see quite a few HDTVs out today that advertise a “240Hz” or even “480Hz” response time. Those high refresh rates aren’t real – they’re interpolated. HDMI 1.3a and earlier don’t have the bandwidth to push very high refresh rates. Instead, the panel interpolates intermediate video frames to attain a high frame rate. This, in turn, can create artifacts or simply look odd, particularly with content originally shot on film at 24fps.

So when you enable THX mode in an HDTV, one thing that gets disabled is high frame rates, the idea being that film looks like it should.

via AnandTech: THX Certified HDTVs – Useful or Just Marketing?.

This story written by Paul Adams

Paul Adams leads an award-winning, diverse contractor team that runs a federal high performance computing facility where he has worked for 17 years. He loves getting his hands on the latest visualization and computer hardware, astronomy, aerospace engineering, working with the poor, and ringing cowbells.