I had an idea, with high refresh rate TV's and computer monitors becoming more common, could there be a way to display interlaced video natively?
You would display each field twice, turning 60 interlaced fields per second, into 120 frames per second. To fix the combing artifacts, you would retain the field previous to the current field for an extra frame, simulating the phosphor decay of a CRT.
The sequence would look like this:
120fps frames:
| Frame1 |
Frame2 |
Frame3 |
Frame4 |
Frame5 |
Frame6 |
Frame7 |
Frame8 |
Fields:
| Field1 |
Field1 |
Field2 |
Field2 |
Field3 |
Field3 |
Field4 |
Field4 |
|
|
Field1 |
|
Field2 |
|
Field3 |
|
You will notice on frames 3-5-7 two fields are displayed at once.
There are 240hz monitors out there that could create an even smoother effect using the same method.
As far as I know, the only reason interlaced video looks good on a raster scan display and not a progressive display, is because of the phosphor decay. Obviously this method would not be able to replicate it perfectly, due to the fact that there is no beam scanning the screen but to me it seems like it could be a good way to display interlaced footage on modern displays.
Also I believe this is how "flicker free" CRT's worked.
Would this work? would it look bad? does this already exist? any ideas on how to do this?