I agree. This looks fantastic. (Gaming)

by Vortech , A Fourth Wheel, Sunday, March 22, 2026, 09:00 (2 hours, 44 minutes ago) @ Kermit

If you go in a Best Buy or some other place that sells TVs, the TVs will be set to showroom mode. Showroom mode, also known as store mode or demo mode, is a setting on TVs used in stores to showcase the television's features like maximum brightness and contrast. This mode is not suitable for regular home viewing as it can distort picture quality and is designed primarily for attracting customers in stores. But stores do it anyway, because people don't buy TVs based on how realistic they look, or how closely they produce the visuals in the source image. In market testing there is a HUGE preference toward TVs that were in showroom mode. Many respondents said they liked it because it seemed more natural or true to life. It makes the TV look "better" because people are initially drawn to bright lights and highly saturated colors.

A while back — at what feels like a decade ago — someone came up with Facetune. An app that bundled a suite of the most common portrait photo retouching tools together into a single focused app. This didn't break any ground, it just made tools that were buried in Photo editing apps easier to access and use. The runaway success of the app lead to many clones and competitors, all of which were trying to win marketshare and so we had a reinforcement spiral of ever more powerful features. The problem is powerful also means greater alterations from the original photo. Soon within a certain cohort, every photo de rigour was of an uncanny person who was edited closer and closer to a fairly narrow ideal of beauty, and the minimum level of acceptability is well above any living person. When people saw photos that were not edited, they thought people looked far "worse" then they do, because what was natural had been formed in an environment where everything - both professional and commercial images were all crafted to create a new different reality, and thus that became their concept of reality. Not only was this warping people understanding of the actual world, individual problems were heightened. People were dehumanized and othered because they were normal, but outside the ideal.

As tv makers had started to fulfill the desires of customers, they started looking for ways to improve TVs that people never asked for. Motion smoothing was invented. I think it's fairly well known, and I'm running out of time, so here is some background if you need it. Computers, in a broad brush changed the work of filmmakers because people who were looking at how to prompt sales in a market where the product was mature and the feature level was high

I see this new feature as another in this line of un-requested features that indiscriminately replaces the intention of artists and champions the idea of "realism" (which is rarely what the purpose of art is) while simultaneously totally shifting the very conception of reality in a directions that is harmful to society. They are doing this, not because it is intrinsically better, but because it's a new thing that they can shout about to sell something that isn't much better at doing what people had actually been asking it to do. It will probably work — as these moves have often worked in the past — for the same reason kids make themselves sick Halloween night and ERs are full of injuries on July 4th. Salt and Sugar makes food "better" but it's also fairly easy to develop a tolerance that grows ever higher until you lose perspective. Bright lights and colors biologically draw attention, but it's not the only beauty in the world.