Today's Fastest Retail LCD

An anonymous reader writes "ViewSonic has recently released a very exciting product, a nineteen inch LCD display with a 3ms response time. This is the fastest LCD panel currently available to consumers, and it is clearly aimed at gamers and movie watchers. Dubbed the VX924, the display is part of ViewSonic's X series which tries to comnbine performance with style. The word on the street is that Samsung will have a 4ms display available this year, but this may be the only 3ms."

Comments

LCD ms numbers are a lie

[AEton]

I learned from this old Slashdot comment that LCD timings are highly misleading. The '3ms' number means something quite different from what you think it means. In short, see this article, or this forum topic. I've reposted the contents of the latter below.
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"Quoted response times by manufacturers are largely meaningless and misleading. .....because it measures the time it takes for full white to black or full black to white pixel transitions. So unless you have your monitor set to maximum brightness & contrast (so that the picture is so bright it burns your eyeballs out) and only use your monitor for flipping blank screens from white to black, and back again, whether the monitor has a 8ms response time or 100ms response time, it doesn't mean an awful lot.

It's the same reason why monitors based on the 20ms Hydis panel outperform the 12ms Samsung panel, the 16ms AU Optronics panel, the 16ms LG/Phillips panel.......

In real world use, the vast majority of monitors (over 95% of them) don't perform anywhere near the quoted response times. That's why you see streaking on the 12ms Samsung panel - its performing at 25-30ms.

Let me try and explain further.

Look at the response times for the so called 'fast' Samsung 172X which is based on a '12ms' panel:-

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/other/samsung-2/gr2 -2.gif

Since most people have their monitors set to medium brightness (about 80-180 on the grey level scale on the graph) and many applications - particularly games use grey to grey pixel transitions (or one colour to another colour) - the typical response time is somewhere between 25-30ms. Not quite 12ms is it?

Now look at the same response time graph for the Acer AL1721 - a mid level TFT with claimed 16ms response time:-

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/other/response-6/a2 1-grey.gif

The graph is much flatter, so across brightness and contrast levels, you're going to get consistent response times. At most common user settings, the "slower" 16ms is actually faster than the "quicker" 12ms panel.

Not quite as straightforward as the manufacturers would like you to think. The problem is, by that time, most people have parted with their money. When I was first looking to buy a TFT monitor, I thought that Kustom PCs were a bit mad to stock the Acer monitors in preference to others. However, it's only on further examination that you discover they perform very very well in games - for example, the AL1731M is based on the Hydis panel - and will in fact, outperform the so called 'faster' TFT panels.

From Toms Hardware Guide:-

"For games, the Hydis 20ms panel is still the one to beat. It's not yet perfect, but we know of no other that is faster (based on our tests, of course, and not manufacturers' specifications). Once again, we must insist strongly that the manufacturers' specifications are not to be trusted. "
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20040326/ lcd-08.html

"The response times suppliers associate with their panels vary, anywhere from 16 ms to 25 ms. The only problem is that these figures mean nothing. Or at least, not a lot. An article published in 2001 that can be viewed at Xtremtech explains the situation pretty well, and we have summarized it for you in the section entitled "RT between colors". But this isn't the only problem..."
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20031105

Re:Response Measurment

[dsginter]

The refresh rate still applies to LCDs and any other display. Basically, instead of "refresh rate", think "frame rate". The best LCDs of today will only refresh at 60 to 75 times per second. For a monitor that runs at 75Hz, this means that the monitor can only display "75 frames per second".

It is all marketing and people are eating it up.

Re:Response Measurment

[ploss]

FTFA, the specs for this monitor are:

LCD Panel: 19" color TFT Active Matrix SXGA LCD
Contrast Ratio: 550:1 (typical)
Viewing Angle: 160 horizontal, 160 vertical
Response Time: 3ms gray-to-gray (avg.); 5ms white-black-white (typical)
Brightness: 270 cd/m2 (typical)
Native Resolution: 1280x1024
Inputs: RGB analog, DVI-D
Dimensions: 17.0" x 18.4" x 7.9" (with stand)
Weight: 14.8lbs (6.7kg) (with stand)
Warranty: Three-year limited warranty on LCD, parts and labor
VESA: 100mm compliant

Re:Response Measurment

[earnest murderer]

You missunderstand the relationship.

With this new display the spec is intended to convey* that even under demanding circumstances a display driven at 75Hz the pixel will be the correct color at least 76 percent of the time. This would be a huge improvement over what is the current situation, which has the same flaws in your example...

at 300Hz with an ideal black to white time of 3ms by the time your pixel arives at the correct value, the value of that pixel has changed (similar to modern panels in the 10-13ms range at 75Hz. That is, your theoretical display never displays the correct color before the color changes (assuming black to white). At 300Hz you would only see a medium gray color, and it's likely that at that fast a refresh rate on a perfect panel the flickering between the two would be fast enough to appear to be a medium gray anyway. If you could comprehend changes at that rate, you would see the same problems with colors "smearing" and "ghosting" that we have on modern panels.

*It's all marketing lies. The truth is this is an improvement, but nowhere near as good as they are trying to convince you it is. I'm sure one of our favorite tech sites will have the real facts soon enough.