Originally Posted by Lizzybif:
“I have had this TV for a couple of weeks and I love it!
However, I have noticed something quite strange a few times and this is people's faces 'morphing' when they nod or shake their head! It's as if part of their face stays put whilst the rest moves!No it isn't Joan Rivers or other cosmetically enhanced persons!
It doesn't happen all the time so I am hoping it is something to do with the broadcast rather than a problem with the TV?
Has anyone else noticed this?”
Bet you are watching a digital channel when it does this. And most likely not BBC1 or BBC2 either.
I've noticed this effect on several freeview channels, useually the ones that use the highest compression rates (ITV4 for instance). Would lay odds it is an artifact of the MPEG compression system used for digital TV.
The harder the broadcasters drive the encoders to squeeze ever more channels out of the limited resources of DTT the more likely these things will be.
If you talk geek

there is an explanation of how MPEG encoding works by the BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/papers/...paper_14.shtml
What is likey to be the cause here is the way the MPEG encoder at the broadcast end and the decoder in your TV handle motion. There is within MPEG a predictive element, wher the decoder effectively "guesses" what the next picture frame will be based on the preceeding frames. If it gets this wrong then you can get the kind of weird effects you have noticed.
The other thing that is interesting in that BBC paper is that it states an acceptable picture can be obtained from MPEG-2 encoding at 6MB/s. Based on the capacity of a DTT multiplex and the number of channels actually being broadcast I'd say that rate would get rid of about two thirds of the channels on freeview if it were ever used!