LCD Monitor or HDTV ???

[Blackdog_kt]

Just as a heads-up on response times, it pays to know what kind of response time is measured since they are not all the same.

About 18 months ago i was looking to replace my 17" CRT monitor and did some digging around, apparently the tests quoted are very misleading not because the makers of the monitors lie, but because the benchmarking methods and standards are very lax.

In short, most of the fast response times are black to white times, which means the time it takes for an LCD crystal to switch from fully on (which allows the light from the backlight to go through) to fully off (which results in black colour). Oddly enough, it seems that it takes less time for the crystal to rotate the entire angle than it takes to switch between two intermediate positions. In the case measurements are taken for intermediate positions, this is referred to as a gray to gray response time. On any particular monitor, g2g will be slower than black to white.

Since most monitors already quote 2ms black to white RTs for years, a conclusion is hard to reach. It's better to have a measurement of g2g response time, because it's there that things will vary a lot and help you pick the fastest monitor. Not to mention that in most applications, including gaming, most of the times the monitor will be working with intermediate polarity values and not go from 0% to 100% all the time, so a g2g response time is a much better benchmark overall.

I ended up buying one of the "slow" IPS panels because of their excellent colour quality and viewing angles. It might have as much as a 6ms black to white response time when TN panels have 2ms, but it also has a a very good 8ms g2g response time as well.

I was still worried about potential ghosting so i decided to run a small test.
I fired up a quick mission in QMB and tried to make the image blur. I used my trackIR4 to look around at that time, so i decided to start switching view direction as fast as i could to force the monitor into rapid redraws of the screen and see if any ghosting will occur. My little experiment proved to me that there's no ghosting whatsoever under normal movements.

In fact, the only way i was able to produce a blurry image was when i moved my head left and right for 5 seconds or so non-stop and at a speed that was ridiculously high, i almost got dizzy. Yes, the image did ghost in the end, but that's not an issue if to make it happen you have to move your viewpoint so fast that it makes the game unplayable in the first place.

Also, since i mentioned viewing angles, that's another aspect where specs don't tell the entire truth. Many monitors boast almost 180 degree viewing angles, but when you see them with your own eyes you can often very easily perceive that there's still color/brightness distortion involved when viewing them from the sides or up/down. The reason is simple, as long as the image retains 10% of the head-on brightness, the industry standards allow the manufacturer to quote the angle as being withing the legitimate viewing angle. In practice however, 10% of the total brightness means you can't really see much.

I've been so spoiled with IPS now that i would never consider going to a TN type panel