You may notice when filming certain lights on your phone, they seem to flicker, even though they don’t look like that to your eyes. This is because the light is flickering, it’s just ordinarily too fast for you to see. Cameras, too, “flicker” – the shutter speed, the rate at which the camera captures images to process into the video, changes the way the light appears in the video, because the two rates interfere. It doesn’t happen with every camera and every light –smartphone cameras and more efficient lights like the fluorescent tube bulbs commonly found in offices or schools tend to clash the worst.
Similarly, screens have something known as a “refresh rate”, which is ordinarily imperceptible except in certain circumstances. Aside from filming, you may notice your refresh rate if you’re trying to watch a movie or play a game with a large frame-rate mismatch, or if you’re a digital artist, you may notice your art tools skipping or lagging on you if your art program is expecting a higher refresh rate than you have on. Luckily, if this is bothering you, it can often be changed. The exact steps will vary based on your operating system: for Microsoft, the answer varies depending on which edition of Windows you have, and for Mac, the steps are different depending on the device you have, including whether it’s a laptop device or a desktop.
It’s important to note that if you lower your refresh rate by a lot, you’ll be saving machine resources, but the resulting flickering, jittering, and possible interactions with your programs might not be worth it. Similarly, boosting the rate or trying to smooth the footage you’re watching won’t always make it look better, and can create what’s known as “the soap opera effect” where your TV or computer fills in missing frames, creating unnaturally smooth on-screen motion. Basically, it looks gross, because that’s not how the people filming the show shot it. At some point, increasing your frames does nothing for your TV, and only makes your games run worse. The human eye itself can’t always perceive an increase past a point – an increase might result in a noticeable choppiness as you don’t see extra smoothing for the extra resources it takes to put those frames up faster.
If you’re interested, you should definitely fiddle with the settings (taking note of your defaults first) because you may find your game or TV program actually looks better running on a lower refresh rate.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/tv-refresh-rates-explained-60hz-120hz-and-beyond
