Philips Digital Natural Motion Creates The Most Relaxing Television Viewing Experience

Unrivalled 100Hz Technology Ensures Smooth Moving Objects On Screen With Razor-Sharp Accuracy

12-Feb-01

Television is about the moving image. From explosive action movies to televised sports coverage, television comes alive with exciting, vibrant imagery. Philips has acknowledged this fact, with Digital Natural Motion, one of the most sophisticated image enhancement technologies available today.Philips Digital Natural Motion - the latest generation of a technology which received the 1995-96 EISA (European Imaging & Sound Association) Video Innovation Award - is the result of Philipsí lengthy history in television picture improvements. These include 100Hz technology, created to reduce screen flicker and create a more relaxing viewing experience by doubling conventional 50Hz field frequency.Philips Digital Natural Motion builds on the foundations of 100Hz technology by ensuring smooth, natural movement of images on large TV screens, eliminating the ""juddering"" of moving objects occurring especially during the broadcast or playback of movies.How Digital Natural Motion WorksIn a 100Hz TV set, each image field is repeated a second time (e.g. AA-BB, with A and B being two individual fields). (This is for the PAL video standard.)In a Philips 100Hz set with Digital Scan technology, the fields are alternated - A-B-A-B - to further eliminate flicker and provide a totally stable picture.To eliminate any juddering which may occur when moving objects are in the picture, Digital Natural Motion uses a digital memory to estimate motion of objects in a field, and creates new frames to insert between existing frames with corrected motion positions of moving objects.The new, inserted fields are computed from motion information - the position of the moving object in time - coming from three fields - the current (A), the next (B) and the previous (Z). By comparing these fields, Digital Natural Motion creates smoother on-screen movements. When there is motion in the picture, the newly created field will locate the moving object(s) in the correct motion position, which makes the movement of objects appear smooth. This principal can be likened to a childís animation flick book - a simple animation effect can be achieved by drawing stick figures ""moving"" over a few pages. However, the more pages, with more subtle changes in each drawing, the smoother and more lifelike the animation effect.The power behind this process is the Philips Falcon chip, which is capable of detecting fast-moving objects, and can handle rapid multi-directional movements at the same time. How Digital Natural Motion Improves A MovieThe benefits of Digital Natural Motion are most noticeable when watching a movie - broadcast films differ from video-based television programming in that the movie has been shot on 8mm, 16mm or 35mm film. Optical movie cameras record at a frame rate of 24 full images per second. However, to broadcast a movie on TV, it has to be converted to the broadcast frame frequency of 50Hz - 50 fields per second, which is around 25 full images. Although this increase in speed is unnoticeable by the human eye, the physical change from, what are effectively 24 individual photographs to a continuous video transmission can create visible artifacts, recognizable in both 50Hz and 100Hz television sets. The Digital Natural Motion algorithm compensates for these artifacts, ensuring that film and video alike are viewed with seamless smoothness and clarity. When combined with sister technologies like 100Hz Digital Scan, Digital Crystal Clear and Active Control, and applied in Philipsí latest Real Flat TV sets, Philips Digital Natural Motion contributes to the most sophisticated package of picture quality technologies available today in a consumer television set. For more information, visit www.philips.com.

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