Although all display technologies have their own unique strengths and steadily improve over time, users’ memories of their initial weaknesses and limitations can plague them forever. The best examples of this effect are plasma displays, with their so-called “burn-in” problem (which is actually uneven aging), something that was technically overcome many years ago but which lingers like an 800-pound gorilla that still threatens to kill this excellent technology. Plasma manufacturers bear much of the blame because they have chosen to avoid this issue in their marketing rather than confronting this widely held perception.

LCDs have their own gorilla: limited response time, which causes motion blur. As with plasmas and burn-in, this was a significant problem many years ago, and it too is no longer an issue now. But unlike plasma manufacturers, makers of LCDs have turned this into a brilliant marketing strategy, offering increasingly sophisticated and enhanced motion processing and ever higher 120- and 240-Hz screen refresh rates to repeatedly oversell a solution to a problem that is no longer a problem.

Consumers, especially the technically savvy, have become enthralled with the response time specifications and the various proprietary motion-enhancement technologies each manufacturer offers, which all spiral in a vicious cycle of one-upmanship. Unfortunately, none of this stands up to objective scientific testing. As we’ll demonstrate, though motion blur with moving test patterns was much worse than what’s claimed in the manufacturer’s specifications, performance during extensive viewing tests with a wide range of live video content viewed simultaneously on a large number of HDTVs turned out much better than we expected. Motion blur proved to be a non-issue for live video in all of the mid-to-high-end LCDs in our tests.

Findings Highlights