LCD motion blur test

I posted this over in the Xbox area where people were discussing 8ms response times of LCD TVs and I thought that some of you might be interested.



I have been really wanting to get a 1080p fixed pixel LCD display. The newer sets are just stunning with an HD-DVD or BLU-Ray player hooked up to them. However, I am a big gamer, and I wanted to be sure that whatever I buy is able to keep up with what I throw at it.

My biggest concern was motion blur. And I recently hauled my PS2 into Best Buy and did some extensive testing on all the latest LCDs.

For a test subject, I used Timesplitters on the PS2 which is a very old first person shooter. The great thing about it is that it runs at 60 frames per second (a characteritic that is becoming more and more rare these days). The very first level has a bunch of pyramid's with detailed textures on them which makes for a good motion test when rotating the camera around.

Now granted, this is pretty much the worst case scenario. The PS2 puts this game out at 480i, so during this testing, the TVs' upscalers and deinterlacers were put to use. Also, my PS2 was hooked up through component cables.

As a control, I am coming from gaming on a 36 inch HD Sony Tube XBR that I've been using for the past 6 years. When I play Timesplitters on it, I can rotate the camera around and the detail within the textures stays "locked in". That is, the detail does not fade or blur at all. It looks beautiful at a perfect 60 frames per second.

One other thing to note is I did very little calibrating during my testing, and did not bother enabling "Game Mode" on these TVs if they had them since, from what I hear, these features are more gimmicks than anything, and people usually shut them off anyway.

So how did the LCDs do? Shockingly bad.

I tried the following TVs:

Sony KDL-V2500 (40")
Sharp D82 (46" with 120Hz refresh)
Samsung LN-T4661 (46")
and at a guy's request some 32" LG that had a 5ms response time

When I loaded up the pyramid level of timesplitters and moved around... ALL of the texture detail in the pyramids was completely lost. A blurry, disgusting mess. I was shocked at how bad it was. A couple of dudes started watching me, saying it wasn't that bad... and then I took them over to the tube TV section and hooked up to an SD sony and showed them what it was supposed to look like. They were shocked as well. The guy who asked me to try the LG said he was going to rethink his decision to get one.

Although they all preformed fairly similar, out of them all, I would say that the Samsung handled it the best... and suprisingly, the Sharp was by far the worst... even with the touted 120Hz refresh rate (which I think I had turned on correctly with "Fine Motion Mode"). Even so, comparing it to the CRT I've been using for the past 6 years, even the Sammy was far from playable.

There is one ray of light though...

I was so discouraged, I decided to go against my bias and try a plasma. I have been against plasma because of the whole image retention thing, as well as the thought of plasma sets consuming so much more power. But on a whim, i hooked up the PS2 to the Panasonic 58" PZ700 (the 50" model wasn't on display, but it is in the same price bracket as the LCDs I tested). There was very little blur. It was perhaps a hair or two behind my CRT, but it was light years better than any of the LCDs I tried.

To summarize... I am now pretty much completely turned off of LCD displays. But I really want a fixed pixel display and will probably start reading up on Plasmas. I know a lot of games these days don't come close to 60 frames per second, which makes this blurring harder to detect, but that doesn't mean its not there.

Yeah like I said, I did very little calibration. It took several hours to do what I did without messing with each set's settings.

Everything I said should be taken with a grain of salt if there are known settings on these LCDs that reduce the blur. After seeing what I saw though, its hard for me to belive that there's some menu selection I can set to make all that blur go away.

No, I didn't do any setting adjustments other than fine motion on the sharp. But in the same breath, I didn't mess with the plasma at all either. Man, this is making me want redo this test just to be sure.

All of the LCDs looked so similar in how they handled this motion, and so different from the tube and plasma... but still I should have gathered ALL of the proper calibration information. Not sure when I'll get another afternoon to do a test like this, unfortunately.

Say you already have a hyndai because when you bought it, ferraris didn't exist. And since you bought the hyndai, you got married and had 3 kids. Why would you buy a 2 seat ferrari and not be able to take your family on a ride anywhere?

Maybe I'm reaching with that one.

Anyway, the only reason I was using a PS2 was because it was small and easy to take into Best Buy and I had a game on it that ran at 60 fps. I state right off the bat that I realize I'm sending it a worst case scenario signal. That being said, both the plasma and the LCDs had to deal with the same thing, and as far as motion blur went, the plasma was way, way better (but not perfect, as I stated).

I have been trying to find the time to repeat this test with a 360, but I've been too busy. It'd definitely be worth it to know how the TV handles a 1080p game signal that it doesnt' have to scale or deinterlace.

For those of you who say you aren't seeing any blur with your 360s, do me a favor. Download the Tony Hawk demo and hook your Xbox 360 up to an old CRT if you still have one lying around. Take notice of the silky smooth frame rate. It looks like flowing water. This demo is mostly 60 fps. Just get up close to a wall with some texture detail on it and swing the camera left and right so the texture detail passes from one side of the screen to the other.

Now hook it up to you're LCD. This is the test I've been wanting to do but haven't found the time. Pay particular attention to the texture detail as an image moves from the left side of your screen to the right. On a tube, you lose absolutely no detail at all. On LCD, your will probably see the image blur.

It is very difficult to notice the blur unless you know exactly what you are looking for. The majority of the games that come out today only run at 30 fps. If you run a 60 fps game on these LCDs, it simply looks like its running at 30 fps (because of the blur). So it might not seem like there is anything wrong.

Froza isn't as good of a test because you are always moving forward and there is never anything directly in front of you. You are usually focusing on an open road. There is very little left to right motion.

Anyway, on a side note, I've given up on finding a living room TV to replace my sony tube. With all the gaming I do, I just can't get rid of it, even if it's tiny and can't take 720p, I'm just too untrusting of Plasma to go that route. However, I will probably be ordering a sammy 4661 for the bedroom. It might be a few weeks off (I want to have a good chance at getting one with a newer motherboard and no HDMI issues), but once I get it, I am going to hammer it with gaming tests.

Yep that's the one, but I think they might have had a few models along those lines. I think my model number is 36XBR400.

Anyway, I'd really appreciate it if you were able to try out that Tony Hawk demo. Its really important that you also try it on a CRT though so you can compare the two.