Sony Announces 120 Hz Hi-Frame Rate SRXD Chip

[Paul Matwiy]

Sony just announced a new version of their SRXD chip (LCoS technology) that permits 120 Hz frame rate. The actual chip drives itself at 240 Hz to clear the image and reduce motion lag. Since many LCD flat panels can accomplish this as well, look for the next race to be 5x frame rate up-sampling and frame interpolation to reduce the motion artifacts present in a 24p signal. I saw a demonstration this year of 3x interpolated playback that reduced image smear and judder. It was impressive.

[Harrison Murchison]

Originally Posted by Paul Matwiy

Sony just announced a new version of their SRXD chip (LCoS technology) that permits 120 Hz frame rate. The actual chip drives itself at 240 Hz to clear the image and reduce motion lag. Since many LCD flat panels can accomplish this as well, look for the next race to be 5x frame rate up-sampling and frame interpolation to reduce the motion artifacts present in a 24p signal. I saw a demonstration this year of 3x interpolated playback that reduced image smear and judder. It was impressive.

Beautiful. 120hz is the present and future.

Great support for 24fps and 60hz outputs. I heard the elimination of judder is present and the smoothness of these displays is evident. I've got my eye on this tech.

[Peter Jefferson]

wonder if the new XDCam will support this..

[Paul Matwiy]

Originally Posted by Peter Jefferson

wonder if the new XDCam will support this..

I suspect not. The film industry in general has not accepted higher temporal quality as a goal; witness the lack of use of such technologies as Showscan. I was surprised a few years ago when I found out that animation for TV used 24 drawings per second rather than 30. It seems they go fo the lower frame rate to save money, and let the 2:3 pull down take care of the additional frames/fields.

I suspect this improvement is designed to make use of interpolating playback technology to improve the image and remove temporal artifacts in 24 fps material. While frame rate upsampling and interpolation has been on the periphery for a bit, this is the first major manufacturer to announce something and to choose 120 Hz in order to accomodate 24p, 30p, and 60i based material. It will be interesting to see if the DLP based digital cinema systems can work at the higher refresh rates.