The Dark Side of LCD Overdrive : Input Lag

@ 2009/02/09
Faster is always better. Thanks to that simple philosophy, LCD pixel response times have been driven down to puny proportions in recent years.

Today, even the slowest panels are rated at 16ms or better and deliver adequate response for all but the most fanatical PC gamers. High performance screens, meanwhile, now trade low single-digit millisecond blows in the battle for fast response dominance.

That’s the good news; the bad news is that the quest for ever lower pixel response times comes with a pair of undesirable side effects: input lag and inverse ghosting. Superficially, the two appear to be unrelated, but they share the same underlying cause. The culprit is a response-enhancing technique known as overdrive.

Also common to both input lag and inverse ghosting is a rather murky cloud of controversy. Some sneer at the idea that input lag even exists, while others argue that while it may exist, only pedants with a penchant for pointless whining could possibly notice it.

Comment from Rutar @ 2009/02/10
The phenomenon is not limited dependent on the price of LCDs. Samsung and Dells VA models are among the worst.
Comment from Kougar @ 2009/02/10
Yep. It's not something most think about when they see those ultra-affordable TFTs, even though they plan to game on them.
Comment from jmke @ 2009/02/10
old or not, the fact that it still exists today in the newest products is proof that the media has had no effect on it yet, so more publicity on this defect is much appreciated
Comment from Rutar @ 2009/02/10
those news are so old:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/6...-crts-yes.html


Its so old the first 0 input lag sceens are out for some time (those aren't errors, they were tested with the timer method):

http://www.digitalversus.com/duels.p...&p2=3215&ph=12


Inverse ghosting is being tested by prad for over a year too.
Comment from jmke @ 2009/02/09
which means dead before you see the enemy, and than you call the other "cheater"
Comment from Kougar @ 2009/02/09
Was a very interesting article... much more informative to use a timer to measure lag versus attempting to photograph loading during games.

60ms input lag is an interesting number. Average broadband person's ping latency is 60ms.