See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

Or a lens flare for that matter

I am intrigued about how you experience films... or books for that matter. If all you see is black and white letters, does this mean you could never experience immersion in the story?

I am a filmmaker. I went to film school. Maybe that has something to do with it?

I cannot recommend enough a book called In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch.

Ah, then there's no need to be intrigued by how WalterBright experiences films. Just remember how you experienced films before you went to film school, or remember how you experience a book or a cartoon (unless you went to book or cartoon school too I guess).

Scenes and cuts, like letters on paper, are the medium. A phone number OTOH is part of the story. Immersion is broken by a badly told story, not the medium.

Going to film school would likely ruin movies for me, as I'd see the man behind the curtain. I used to watch the "making of ..." bonus features, until I realized they'd ruin the movie.

It's like that for video games for me. I used to program them for a job when I was in college. Ever since, when I see a video game, I don't see the game so much as how it is constructed and programmed.

Thanks. This is a good point. I don’t remember experiencing films that way. I actually struggled to even follow storylines in films when I was younger, so I don’t think I ever got immersed as described.

I experience immersion in books. What drops me out of immersion is misspellings. I remember one which was a good story, but about 90% of the pages had at least one misspelling. It's like hitting a pothole when you're driving.

Book misspellings have changed over the years. Since people use spell checkers now, they are of the form:

    He arrived at the top of the stairs painting heavily.

Yes, that's an actual example :-)

With films, I drop out of immersion when seeing things like reflections of the camera crew, anachronisms, etc.

It's slightly individual, e.g. some may pick up on misspellings in books (or anachronisms or mismatching sound in video) more easily than others, but my theory is whenever something concerns the story or requires any effort to determine whether it concerns the story or not it breaks immersion.

Misspellings in books, foreign objects or people in a show or film, obviously fake phone numbers and things like that fall into that category.

On the other hand, things like paper quality or font choice (and lens angles, cuts, video resolution, color) tend to not break immersion if the story is right.

We see real life through a lens, we don't see real life with 555 numbers

You absolutely do NOT see real life through a lens. This is one of the first things you learn in film school.

It's literally impossible to see without a lens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_(anatomy)