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Flicker is worse when the screen occupies a greater fraction of your vision. This is simply because peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement (and hence flicker) than central vision. 60Hz may look OK when watching TV from a reasonable distance but it's horrible when close up to a computer monitor.
For interlaced pictures there is an additional 25Hz or 30Hz flicker which is hard to describe but very obvious on 625 or 525.
When I was a kid, the 50Hz large area flicker and 25Hz interlace flicker didn't bother me at all. That's how it was and most of us in Europe were used to it. In my late 20s (c1985) I got a job where I was investigating flicker on displays so I had to train myself to see it. Ordinary TV looked flickery then. We had an experimental rig that could show pictures with various scan rates and 2:1 or 1:1 interlace. 50Hz without interlace was pleasant. 100Hz interlaced wasn't too bad but 100Hz without interlace was lovely. It was also at the limit of the kit we were using so picture quality suffered in other ways. When I left that job I gradually became less sensitive to flicker again.
At the Broadcast Engineering Museum we have built an all-CRT gallery (control room in US parlance) so many of the monitors are inevitably in peripheral vision. They flicker horribly.
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