In another thread I commented on how I went over to my parents for the holidays and took my LD player with me to hook it up to their CRT television as they still had one and I wanted to see how it measured up. On every other metric I'd say my LCD is better, except for the motion; all the panning, booming, tilting etc. shots were as smooth as butter, whereas my LCD it always appears a bit jerky at best and gives me straight up frame tearing at worst.

Is there anything I can do to improve on this, short of getting a 120Hz TV or something?

If it only happens on composite/LD (not on BRs over HDMI) then if you can’t fix it with settings an external box may help.

If it happens with everything then probably not. Do try a few things in the settings though. If anything is ON or OFF try both since new TVs are all digital (more code than actual electronics) there are a myriad of non-obvious interactions between functions, especially on low end sets.

If none of this works buy a 4K Sony...or probably any Sony, or of course a CRT. My opinion though is that nothing flat moves like a CRT. I’ve studied the same game running HD and SD next to each other and it’s very very obvious. I don’t get tearing but everything in motion is grimier on the HD, or in this case UHD.

The test was RGB (240p) from a MVS running Metal Slug 3 into both a Toshiba 19” CRT (via YpBpBr from a Neo Bitz transcoder) and a 4K Bravia via a RetrotinkRGB so the TV scales 480p to 4K. The 4K set did look really really REALLY good statically but when zombie Fio moves back and forth...a lot of clarity is lost. The lag is also extremely obvious when viewing this arrangement.

The real solution probably is to ditch all the CRTs. They’re what I see every day that reminds me how much LCD sucks. If I didn’t have any CRTs left I’d eventually stop noticing it like everyone else has.

My TV is way too sh!tty to have anything fancy, I don't think it even has the motion smoothing which so many people cry about. It definitely seems to me more dependent on the source than the TV itself. I watched an NTSC DVD the other day, no problems that I noticed there.

Question is, what sort of box should I try?

Too bad this stuff is so heavy and international shipping blows. I have an extron scaler that I never use but shipping would probably cost about as much as sourcing a unit from Europe.

It's a DVS 304A if you are interested I would only want shipping cost.

I wouldn't bet on it.

If you think it would help and you want it just shoot me a message.

You know its funny that I actually get frame tearing more from poorly mastered DVDs than any LDs, but my sets are all LED I think.

I’m not talking about a fancy feature, I meant that any feature at all may be the thing that when shut off or on makes the issue go away. We’re looking for happy accidents hoping to find them.

In truth you probably just need a new TV. The good set top boxes all cost more than a reasonably sized quality TV. A 42” 4K Sony is $600 these days.

I guess, but my current one has plenty of legacy connections and I'd rather not have to buy a whole new TV just to have to buy a set top box anyway just to hook everything up.

You don’t, because 4K Bravia don’t do this. I’d be surprised if any Sony did in the history of their company unless maybe it was a kitchen top unit from 2005. New TVs don’t need boxes, at least not from my experience. By no means am I saying Sony TVs are perfect, I have a very love/hate relationship with this company, but they aren’t a Korean phone manufacturer and that’s a big distinction. There is still a minimal standard of quality of Sony and a drive to create something cool that isn’t a giant tablet but in fact a television monitor.

You won’t have s-video input, but you probably won’t care. Despite people coming here saying new TVs don’t have composite inputs I’ve found this to be extremely rare even now. Composite and component are likely on all their medium priced sets. Check the specs per model.

Well, I finally got some adapters to do some testing and I'm afraid the news aren't good; I'm not sure if the scaler works at eliminating frame tearing because it turns out the picture it puts out is significantly worse than if I just have the player hooked up straight to the TV. The outcoming picture is incredibly noisy no matter how much I fiddle around with the settings. Maybe it'd be better if I had an external comb filter between the player and the scaler but I wonder if that'd really be worth the effort at this point?

Damn, sorry it didn't turn out great after all that.

The ultimate solution to this would be real-time inverse telecine and the HDMI signal refresh rate at 24 Hz. PotPlayer (or MPC-BE) + MadVR can do this, but that's going to require a full PC with a quality video capture card hooked up to your TV. I think that's more than most people want to bother with to watch some Laserdiscs.

But if you're slightly insane like me, it's a nice solution. The upscaling is phenomenal too, but that requires a pretty beefy video card.

Thanks to pbiancardi for putting MadVR on my radar...

The ultimate solution is to just have a good TV.