Picked up 2405fpw for cheap, arrived yesterday. HDTV clips play nicely. Then I fired up Mount and Blade to test movement (fastest thing to load hehe). Immediatly noticed weird motion blur and thought this must be what people mean by ghosting. It looks like the 6 million dollar man when they did the special effects and he went really really fast by going really really slow.
Disclaimer: I’ve never used any sort of LCD for gaming before. I’ve been using a Diamondtron 22" CRT a few years, and pretty much cheap CRTS before then. At work I use LCDs but have never played any video clips, or done gaming on em.
I’m trying to justify my purchase and hoping I will get used to it. The defect must be in the human interface! The reviews I saw on the 2405 mostly say “zero ghosting”. I am annoyed I fell for it.
Now the interesting bit is I can run two decently-sized windows side to side. Looking to see if there’s a quick shortcut app I can use to tile two windows quickly. Say you 5th button click the windows. The last two windows you 5th click are automatically tiled on the screen.
12 23 34 scheme or perhaps something like 12 32 34 54 56 76 78 98
This seems like the easiest test for ghosting online. Watch out for the pop-up ads though.
My CRT at work, for reference, has no ghosting but does exhibit some tearing. My new LCD has little tearing but, even though listed as an “8ms” moniter, shows almost as much ghosting as my old 25ms moniter. At least in this particular test.
Oh that’s certainly true, and newer moniters are much better about ghosting in games then older moniters in general. But, just as some sort of objective test, it works pretty well. Even if it’s a “worse case” scenerio going from gray-gray or red-gray or whatever.
Ghosting seems to have a kind of movement threshold. In my old moniter, i’d get visible ghosting by simply panning my view around. With my new moniter, i see ghosting once i pan faster then a certain speed. If i pan slowly, the ghosting dissapears.
Overall LCD quality is better today then the average CRT, but there are still a few problems that might bother people.
Why the hell is wisefool getting ghosting? My 2005 certainly doesn’t have any. Could it be because of his videocard, or if he’s using VGA instead of DVI?
That’s a pretty neat test. My Dell UltraSharp 1905FP shows some ghosting, but really, after a while I got used to it in games. Between my PSP and my LCD, ghosting doesn’t bother me anymore.
In fact, when I switch back to CRTs, 3d games suddenly look so jagged and choppy. Say what you will about ghosting, but it does smooth out frame transitions in 3d games and makes the experience seem subjectively smoother.
Did you try that flash test? I run a dual monitor setup at work, one CRT and one 1905FP. Dragging the app back and forth between the windows is pretty interesting. On the CRT, it’s just a square. On my 1905 there’s a definite trail.
Thank you for that flash app, I thought I was going crazy. On my 1905fp here at work there is definitely a lot of ghosting. It looks like a cube!
At home, with the 2405 I am using an AGP 6800GT. It’s connected directly on the DVI. I have a few other DVIs I could test with later, but don’t really have any gaming-capable video cards.
Running native 1920*1200 60hz, I will try running at 75hz. Ran into a thread where someone measured 75hz having a lower input lag so maybe that does the difference.
The gist however was that setting windows to 100hz makes more data flow to the monitors DSP which only outputs 60hz. But the fact that having faster speed to the dsp reduces the lag about 15-20%.
There’s a simple way to check for ghosting – just run dxdiag. (From the command prompt or using Start -> Run.) Go to the Display tab and click the two Test butons. Both animate a box on a black background which should clearly show any ghosting. For the record, my 2405 FPW does show a little ghosting here – just a frame behind, really, and IMO barely noticeable when playing games.
Based on that prad.de test, the 2405FPW has obvious ghosting. Like Chris says, it’s about one frame’s worth. The 2001FP doesn’t have any ghosting.
In a 1st person shooter, it won’t be obvious, and if you can see it, it’ll present itself as highly-realistic motion blur. It’s a FEATURE not a bug, see? :)
The Prad.de ghosting on the 2405 is pretty light. The black border comes out as dark green trail, and the area enclosed by the borders is a light green. Must be some circuitry involved trying to cancel the afterimage. Not too bad! I am feeling a bit better. At work on a 1905fp the afterimage is a huge red trail, about 20% the length of the square.
I’ll fire up battlefield this weekend and blame my deaths on LCD lag :) haven’t played it since Civ4 came out. You guys are scaring me with the defective panel talk hehe but I think it will be okay, I just have to get used to this newfangled technology.
You might try reducing your refresh rate. The lower the refresh rate on an LCD, the less ghosting… but, most of them are running at 60 Hz, which is already their minimum, so maybe it won’t help.
As for the 70lb LCD: I suggest you switch back to it :)
