24fps? 100Hz? Has nothing to do with cables!

Fact: 24fps and 100Hz cannot be features or functionality of a cable. If a sales assistant tells you that you need a certain HDMI cable otherwise 24fps and 100Hz won’t work, they are either lying to you or are simply completely uninformed!

24fps and 100Hz technologies relate to image processing technology built into devices not cables. They can be features and functionality of your HDTV certainly, but definitely not your cable. These technologies relate to the way your display processes the data sent to it via a HDMI cable.

A HDMI cable does not affect and cannot dictate whether or not these functions of your display will either work or not.

The HDMI cable is the vehicle for which the data can be passed from source to screen, it does not have a brain, it cannot process data like a microchip, it can merely provide the link so that one device can pass data to another.

As we keep reiterating throughout our articles, the most important factor influencing HDMI cable choice is that it is capable of carrying 100% of the signal data from the source to the screen reliably. If 100% of the data reaches your display, the display’s image processor can decode that data and you can enjoy the enhanced 24fps and 100hz features of that display.

So what is 24fps?

Hollywood movies are shot at 24 frames per second which gives films the superb, cinematic, slightly flickering quality we associate with them at the movie theatre. When recorded to DVD or Blu-ray disc, they are also generally encoded using 24p (24 frames per second, progressive) technology. However, the problems start when we want to view them on our home TVs which operate at a slightly higher number of frames per second. For example the general European standard (PAL) uses 50Hz processing, 50 frames per second. Until now, most TVs use a technique known as 'pull down', which approximately matches the 24p frames with the TV's native frame rate, however this can cause some image judder as the source frames and the displayed frames do not match up exactly.

To overcome this issue, some manufacturers have introduced a 24P Playback function on some of their display devices. This new functionality uses image processing technology to precisely match-up the frames with the 24p source and play it back without judder. The displays image processeor combines the superb playback with high precision frame creation in order to deliver unrivalled smoothness and motion transition. With this feature of your display device you can truly enjoy your favourite films in the same cinematic quality that the directors originally intended.

100Hz?

The standard European PAL broadcast signal is 50Hz, meaning that the on-screen image on your TV is refreshed 50 times each second. However, some displays have 100Hz Double Scan technology built-in, meaning that the screen refresh rate is doubled, resulting in images without flicker.