[ro53ben]

The easiest way to understand IFC is to think of a stroboscobe (strobe light) in a night club.

When it's flashing at certain rates, people on the dance floor will have the impression of moving around in a jerky fashion. People moving quickly will move a long way between flashes. The faster the flashing, the smoother their movement will be.

An PAL SD TV source is going to have a shutter rate of 25fps which is ok, but not exceptionally smooth when compared to computer games that can run at hundreds of frames per second. To add to this, most screens now run at 100Hz - updated 4 times more often than the source on a PAL signal.

A 100Hz screen is able to be considerably smoother than a PAL source, so what IFC does is attempt to guess how the frame is going to change between the previous frame and the next.

If you watch Lewis Hamilton flying along the straight at 200mph, you may find that his movement isn't entirely smooth as his car travel such a distance between frames it appears to jump from one frame to the next. With IFC enabled, the TV will insert a false image in-between the 2 real ones which clearly makes the movement smoother. As the eye can follow it easier, things like advertising banners etc. are all easier to read....without IFC they can be a bit blurred.

It's not a perfect technology though and on many sources I believe it looks worse. It's just a case of turning it off/on as required.