LCD or CRT?

Hi franman, I can tell you from my experience as a competitive pc-gamer (won cs 2 years in a row at digital overload) that you want nothing more than an 8ms response time, which is very easy to find. The screen I play SC4 on is a 19" Benq moniter which has a 2ms response time and i got it like 2.5 years ago for $300. So this lag or "ghosting" is a minor problem these days. it was a pain 2 years ago tho.


tl:dr LCD all the way dude as long as its <8ms response
 
As I already said whitey... input lag is not the same as ghosting!

Response time =/= Input lag time

Jaxel said:
Response time is not the same thing as Input lag time... Response time is basically, how long it takes a lcd crystal to go from white, to black and back to white again. LCDs with bad response times end up having a weird effect called "ghosting"... where you see image trails because the LCD isnt refreshing fast enough to keep up. Absolutely nothing to do with input lag.
Click to expand...

Input lag is the time it takes the monitor to recieve the input stream, and then display it out to the user. Basically, every 16.6ms is a single frame. So if you are playing on an LCD screen that has a 80ms input delay, then you are going to be 5 frames behind... Most LCD screens have about 25-50ms delay; which is why most gamers almost never want to play on an LCD screen for fighting games. For RTS and FPS games, its not much of an issue; but with fighting games that have just frames... input delay can make or break a purchase.
 
Hmmm.. I would've thought the input delay on an LCD would have been in the same region as the refresh rate period, because I was under the impression that refresh rate was the bottleneck for CRT monitors as well. Even with a 60Hz refresh rate (which is also the refresh rate of SC, yes?) on LCD tvs, that should be 16.6ms (or 8.3ms for 120Hz) not inupwards of 25-50ms.
However, this is assuming there is no lag in the signal before getting to the TV and no post-processing, just pure signal displaying. I could very well be mistaken, I'm no expert.

I have 2 questions on this topic (I too am researching HDTVs for gaming purposes).

1)If an LCD TV has input delay, does that make JFs impossible? The console will still be running with no lag, so as long as the timing is correct wouldn't that still result in a JF?

2)Numbers and reviews are great, but what is the best way to test an LCD tv for input delay and reponse time? I was planning on hooking up the game console in store and testing it myself. What should I look for? What should I do (in game or out) to visually see a level of performance?
 
Most LCD's these days are 8ms or under so ut isnt really an issue.

It would be pretty safe to assume that as long as you have any sort of image processing turned off and also scaling turned off that there should not be any input delay. Also XBOX 360 has dedicated hardware scaler so you can set it to any resolution and it should play lagg free, The PS3 from what i udnerstand uses software scalers but its only for PS2 games and the console is only able to output PS3 games at whatever the native resolution of the game is. Since most games are 720P i would think its safer to go with a 720P screen so there is as little scaling done as possible to avoid lag regardless of which console you use.

I not 100% sure about the PS3 stuff so someone should correct me and its usualy better to down scale than upscale both visually and speed wise.

Honestly if you want to do strictly for gaming i would invest into a PC monitor with HDMI inputs and HDCP support, this way ther wont be any issues of input delay and all that. For testing HDTV's best bet woudl be to go in and demo it, JF's are a good way to test. I'm pretty sure you'll be abel to feel the lag if there is any at all.
 
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