I'm looking into an LCD. Will be used for both gaming and movie watching. This whole response time thing has be frustrated. Companies don't measure the same and most of them won't post a true response time. It seems to me from what i have read that ghosting is becoming less of an issue. But i don't want to drop some good coin on a new lcd and have to deal with that. I know I can go out and look at them to see what color/pictures looks the best for me (as we all have different preferences) but not sure of anyway to measure possible ghosting issues other than response time. So my big question is this?
A. I am thinking that I need to try and stay under 8ms on grey to grey? Is that correct?
B. For those companies that actually post "true" response times (black to white to black) what is a good benchmark? I know it is substantially higher than 8ms but don't know if it is double, triple, quadruple?
Or is this all moot and pretty much all newer lcds are fast enough?
If anyone needs more scoop on price/size etc these are all open to debate. I can afford one on the bigger end but this isn't going to be my main movie watching screen so no problem with smaller if that will mean better gaming. So eventhough i do watch movies and do other stuff with my computer my main interest is the best possible gaming experience (without getting CRT, I know this I am a heretic, sorry).
I guess I'll add a second piece to this. I keep seeing reports on upcoming LED backlit LCD tvs. Seems like more are coming soon. Right now way expensive but I can't find anything on response time. Contrast ratio appears to be great but is response time better/worse/same as other types of LCDs?
I have done a lot of work with LCD response times for a game called UltraPin. I found that manufacturers lie about the response time. If they measure the response time in grey to grey triple the response time. So some monitors with an 8ms delay can really have a delay of up to 24ms. If the MNF measures in black-white-black on average double the response time. These days depending on the monitor size I would shoot for a LCD response time of 5ms.
This is what the manufacturer does not tell you about the LCD monitor:
Keep this in mind, the LCD screen itself might have a delay of 8ms to change a pixels color, but there is also a response time on the LCD converter/driver board. The driver board converts a VGA signals into LVDS signals that the LCD can display. So you have to take this into account as well because converting a signal does take time in milliseconds. Depending on how good the driver board is the conversion to LVDS can be short or long and by long I mean another 8ms to 16ms to convert the signal. This problem will go away over time because soon video cards will be able to output a LVDS signal that directly drives the LCD monitor.
I appreciate the response but it does bring up some questions. You said you would shoot for 5ms. GTG 5 ms? I assume not true since it sounds like they are all much slower on a true response? also, taking that assumption does that mean that true response times of 20 - 30ms are actually pretty good? (assuming you could actually get that data from a manufacturer?)
In your work and research do you have any recommendations for lcds that you felt performed very well?
I think a 5ms response time is about the fastest your going to find without paying to much of a premium price for the monitor. A claim of 5ms should mean that the LCD screen can change the pixel color in 5ms, but you have to consider how long it would take to change the signal from VGA to LVDS. On average I would say the conversion on a good card would be another 5ms. So when a manufacturer claims a 5ms response time you are actually looking at 10ms to 15ms response time which is pretty good. Anything above 15ms and you will start to see ghosting. Ghosting becomes really viewable when the actual response time goes above 20ms.
I have also noticed the size of the screen makes a big difference on response time, a 19 – 22inch monitor can have a average response time of 5ms or less, where as most screens above that size default to 8ms or higher.
There is only one way to test the true response time of a LCD. You need a Nvidia video card set to run dual monitors in clone mode. You hook a CRT to one video port and a LCD to the other. Then run a simple stop watch program that will display seconds down to the hundredth or thousandth scale. Position the CRT and LCD right next to each other and run the stop watch program. Use a digital camera with a fast shutter speed and use that to take a picture of both the CRT and LCD screen in the same shot. You can then look at the stop watch time for each monitor in the picture. When I did this test the LCD had a slower time on the stop watch than the CRT and if you compare the 2 stop watch times you can subtract the times and get the true response time of the LCD monitor compared to a CRT. When I did this test the LCD was about 20ms behind the CRT, much slower than the 8ms the manufacturer was stating. If anything the LCD manufacturers should use this test setup to measure the true LCD response time, but they never will because it make their product look horrible compared to a CRT.
We finally ended up on a Samsung LCD screen, but the driver board was made by somebody else called Estecom. I would choose a Samsung screen with a good response time. Please keep in mind other manufacturers will use a Samsung LCD panel and then use their own proprietary conversion/driver board and this is where the big question on response time really comes into play. There a really only 2 manufacturers of LCD panels, Samsung and LG. I found that LG had the lesser quality when compared to Samsung. The best thing is to get a manufacturer number of the LCD monitor you want to get and then look at customer reviews. I type the LCD model into a Google search along with the word reviews and you should be able to find out how good the monitor truly is.
