The extended Black Friday sale season is nearly upon us, which means a lot of people will be buying new TVs. The top sets today can display in up to 8K Ultra High Definition, they have deeper blacks, brighter highlights and are thinner and lighter-weight than ever. And yet, modern TVs have their haters — a dedicated group of purists who find them lacking in some important ways.

Rahul Banerji, a tutor in Long Island, is among the afflicted. “I tend to be someone who is very perceptive and very obsessive,” he said.

Food scientist Vikrant Lal in New Jersey also notices weird things onscreen that other people don’t. “And then you don't want to say anything, because, like, other people don't see it, or they don't get it,” he said.

No, this isn’t a supernatural thing a la “The Sixth Sense” — rather it’s a problem with watching cinematic content like that on modern TVs. 

All those spooky slow pans and tense tracking shots, meant to pull viewers into the imaginary world, just look wrong to them somehow. 

“The only way to describe it is just like it's very surreal and unnatural,” said Banerji.

“The motion seems off to me,” said Lal, “like as if there's a skip, like as if the internet connection broke down.”

Banerji has actually bought and returned two top-of-the-line OLED TV’s.

“Even though this is supposed to be a better technology, I'm really not enjoying this,” he said. “I'm really just distracted by the unnatural motion on it.”

So he bought an old plasma screen on Facebook Marketplace for $40.  

Lal, too, is a plasma partisan.

“I don't care that it's 15 years old,” he said. “I love that old TV. To me, that sounds better, looks better than anything that's on the market right now.”

New LED and OLED TVs can display images in much higher resolution than older plasmas. The picture is so clear, bright and sharp it can feel like you’re right there at the 50-yard line of a football game and you can actually follow the passes down field.

But the same advances that have made TVs better for sports or nature content have actually made them worse in some ways for movies, said Samuel Breton, at the TV testing site RTINGS.com.

“It is always a tradeoff, right?” he said. “There is no perfect TV.”

Movies and most prestige narrative content are shot at a lower frame rate than other TV. It’s a relic of film reels, but helps create the dreamy aesthetic we associate with cinema.

On older tech, like projectors and plasma, those frames were displayed in imperceptible flickers — our brain filled in the gaps. But new TVs hold one frame and instantaneously show the next. And because movies have fewer frames per second, they hold each one longer — giving almost a slideshow feel at times.

“The difference in space between the two frames sometimes is large enough that it looks like it's jumping between,” he said. “It looks like the image is like flashing and bouncing back and forth.”

The more clear and bright a TV is, the worse the stutter appears, particularly in panning shots.

There is a fix on new TVs: a setting, if you can find it (it’s called something different by every brand — Auto Motion Plus on Samsung, Motionflow on Sony, and TruMotion on LG) that inserts fake frames to smooth motion out. But it’s also controversial.

Tom Cruise put out a public service announcement in 2018, warning viewers about the dreaded “soap opera effect,” where everything just looks oddly digitized — overly sharp and almost hyperreal, like you’re watching surveillance video of actors on a soundstage rather than a film.

But without motion smoothing you’re back to the stutter problem, which TV advances have intensified since Tom pleaded with viewers all those years ago to turn motion smoothing off.

“You can actually make these systems more intelligent,” said Mahesh Balakrishnan, vice president and general manager of consumer technology at Dolby Laboratories, which has developed a new system, Dolby Vision 2 Max, which can turn motion smoothing on selectively — only for shots or scenes where its needed.

Creators can encode their preferences in the metadata Balakrishan said, but the system can also use machine learning to automatically detect scenes, like those with a lot of side to side motion, where stutter tends to be most obvious.

Yep, AI could hold the key to more natural cinematic motion.

For those more interested in the tried and true tech of yesterday, I hear you can get a pretty good deal on a used plasma.

Clarification (Oct. 30): This story was amended to clarify that Dolby’s machine learning system detects when to apply motion smoothing but doesn’t apply it itself.