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Are LCD Displays Ready For Gaming?
Player issues this query: "Since the holiday season is rolling around, I've been contemplating shelling out the big bucks for a nice LCD display. I'm a die-hard gamer, with several choices of monitors in the market today, it can get a little confusing. Ghosting seemed to be a problem with intense games, but with displays reaching 8ms-16ms response time, is it really an issue anymore? Is it time for this gamer to move on to greener pastures, or stay the course with my trusty CRT?"
It isn't just about the response time bla bla bla, but also you. Depending on your eyes, your brain, etc you may see ghosting where others do not, just like some people see the rainbow effect with certain projectors.
Your best bet is to go into a store and try them out. If the store doesn't have some games to test them with, take a demo cd or something. Additionally, buying in a store is one of the few ways to guarantee you don't get a bad pixel or ten.
Come on people, get the terminology right. Ghosting and motion blur are not the same thing!
Ghosting is when you get a faint duplicate of the entire on-screen image, slightly offset from what it should be. I don't think this can even occur on LCDs, I think it is a CRT-only problem, but if you use crappy analogue VGA cables, then who knows?
Motion blur is what you thing ghosting is. It is caused by poor refresh times, more specifically it is caused the amount of time it takes for a pixel to become unlit, or "switch off". So LCD screens that have a poor response time often show a trail after a moving object that looks like a ghost of the object.
Understandable that you could get the two confused, but still wrong.
/mike
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
I recently bought a Sony SDM-S204/B 20.1" LCD and while pretty pricey, it looks amazing both playing games and on the desktop. I did quite a bit of research on these and it seems like the response time stats given by manufacturers are pretty meaningless - they vary widely in the specification measurements.
Basically, the ISO standard measures the time taken to move a pixel from totally black to totally white (actually to within a small percentage). This ISO standard for response times is not very good and needs to be replaced - mostly because this is not a typical scenario, pixels are much more likely to be moving from some percentage on to some percentage off, or vice versa. If you have a major colour change, the voltage differential is going to be much greater so the movement will be faster. Panels are being created that manipulate the standard measurements to only improve the black to white transitions, totally ignoring the common case scenario for benchmarking performance. This anandtech article gives a pretty good (and brief) explanation on why these times are basically completely meaningless.
One other thing to be wary of is the interpolation methods some of the cheaper monitors use when not displaying in native resolutions. Try setting the desktop to 800x600 and even 640x480 in the store just to see how fuzzy things get. The sony has a native resolution of 1600x1200, but I don't often get to play games in that res - but running 3d and 2d games in 1024x768 and 800x600 even both still look fantastic. This wasn't the case with my previous (cheap) lcd, and it certainly wasn't the case with a lot of the monitors I checked out in the store.
Figured I'd say my bit here since most of the posts keep referring to how they have a 16ms response time or 25ms response time and there is no ghosting.
First off, I own two LCD monitors, a VG175 and a VP171b. The former was from back in the day when ghosting was prevalent and the VP171b is newer and definitely nice for gaming. The VG175 was ok for gaming, but would ghost now and then.
Before I went and purchased the second LCD I did a lot more research on the area. What I found surprised me. The specification for 'Response Time' is a marketing gimmick. It has no bearing on how well the monitor performs for playing back DVDs and games. That's the kicker...
Response time is measured as the time for the monitor to goto *full black* to *full white* and back to *full black*. Which you would guess is the proper way to do it. Unfortunately, many LCDs out there optimize the hell out of the black to white switching and leave the switching between colors incredibly slow. This can lead to ghosting.
So how do you figure out which is best? Research opinions on the net, but most of all, insist that you see the monitor in action before purchasing it. It's the only way to tell. There was a tech site that I went to that detailed the spectrum analysis of the VP171b and that's what got me to buy into it. Seeing it action made it real and so I bought it. There were a few others in contention that claimed to have lower or equivalent response times, but they couldn't handle the picture as well as the VP171b.
Granted, I purchased the VP171b almost a year ago now. So it's quite likely that there's something better out there. But my advice to you is to try before you buy.
Hope this helps.