Ghosting on new monitor :(

[Kenjiin]

Hey

I finally upgraded from my old Acer AL1916W (19" 1440x900) yesterday and got a Samsung S23B300H (23" 5ms LED 1080p). While the picture quality is a huge step up to say the least and its much brighter and colours are more vibrant, I seem to notice a lot more ghosting while playing games, mainly ones with top down camera angles and the background is scrolling.

It's really annoying >_< But I did hook up my old Acer and noticed it did happen in that too, but I guess because the image wasn't as sharp, or large, it was harder to notice because it was much softer.

The ghosting is mainly noticeable on text, so when I'm panning the camera left or right, the image blurs slightly or go's a little fuzzy. Really noticeable when there's item text on the floor in diablo, or city names in Civ.

This monitor was only £110, but playing on such an old monitor before, I wasn't aware of these issues.

Is this something that happen's with a lot of Hi-res monitors? I guess I could put up with it if this is just going to happen with monitors in around about this price range, but if its just this model then I'd be tempted to see if I can return it and see if I can pick up a better monitor for gaming that's around the same size and price.

Any ideas? Is this sort of thing pretty normal?

 

[PCM2]

Some amount of ghosting is perfectly normal in situations such as that on even the fastest 60Hz monitors. The S23B300H (and SB300 series more broadly) doesn't have any real grey to grey acceleration and are generally slower than Samsung's accelerated models. I always tell people not to pay too much attention to figures (2ms vs 5ms etc.) for the absolute value, but in this case it is a useful indicator.

If you would like a snappier model and are happy to stick with Samsung models then I'd look at the SB350, SB370 and SB550 (the S23B550VS being one of the better options currently). These models have a quoted 2ms grey to grey response time. Ignore the figure, it just means that it uses pretty effective grey to grey acceleration and many of the pixel transitions will be faster. This should cut down on ghosting in instances such as this.

 

[Kenjiin]

Thanks, I learned something

With those other models you listed it wouldn't cut out the ghosting completely would it? It would still be there to some degree?

If so then I think I'll just put up with it for a while. Do the 120hz monitors get rid of the issue all together?

Also, just a question about why it happens in general (So I learn something else lol), Why is it that it's a lot more noticeable moving the screen horizontally rather that vertically?

My old Acer had an 8ms response time :O I'm surprised I didn't ever really notice it on that, but then that's maybe cause the image was softer so it was harder to notice the distortion. Plus my brain wasn't picking out problems with my shiney new toy

 

[Rroff]

Ah the old AL1916 - can't remember the reason why but they had lower input latency/faster pixel response than many panels at the time even tho the image quality wasn't that great (soft/warm). IIRC the first run of that panel also did true 75Hz (rather than interpolated) which not many panels did/do.

TBH You'll find a lot of non-120Hz panels dissapointing for purely gaming coming from that.

 

[Kenjiin]

Thanks for your help guys

Yeah I think my Acer is 75hz, there's just no way I can go back to that after playing at 1080p lol, It's like going from a PS2 to a PS3.

I guess I'll put up with it until I can afford a 120hz monitor, but I have plenty more things to upgrade before then. Do HDTV's have a different refresh system then? I've never noticed ghosting on them, and my Toshiba 32" Regza is about 4yrs old now :/

Thanks for all this info guys

 

[Rroff]

TVs are a bit more of a complicated story - also console gaming due to tending to be 30fps and a bit slower on movement with the nature of the controller tends to mask issues that would be more apparent if you were playing on a PC with mouse + keyboard.