[Arizonian]

What does Response Time 2 ms (Gray to gray) mean in specs? Got a new ASUS VG278H monitor and was curios what that spec actually meant?

 

[ljason8eg]

Its basically the time it takes for a pixel to change from one color value to another. Faster response time means less ghosting.

 

[Schmuckley]

yah..2ms response time is good :

: the majority of monitors (lcd) are 5 ms

 

[Phantom_Dave]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_time_%28technology%29
Quote:

Response time is the amount of time a pixel in an LCD monitor takes to go from one value to another and back again. It is measured in milliseconds (ms). Lower numbers mean faster transitions and therefore fewer visible image artifacts.

For an LCD display, typical response times are 8 to 16 ms for black-white-black, or 2 to 6ms for grey-to-grey.

 

[Arizonian]

Thanks the Gray to Gray was what I wasn't getting regarding the seek time.

 

[wedge]

Advertised specs are meaningless. There is no industry standard for measuring response time, or contrast ratio, or anything like that. Which basically means the manufacturers can advertise any numbers they want. They will run their monitors through all the different tests that they have, then advertise whichever one has the best result, even if it's not representative of real world performance. This means that specs like response time cannot be compared between manufacturers because it becomes apples and oranges. You can't even compare specs from two different monitors from the same manufacturer, because there's no guarantee the results were achieved the same way.

The best thing to do is to have some faith in reviewers, and mostly in your own eyes.
Also, you generally get what you pay for. If you were to compare a 1080p monitor with a 2ms GtG and 50000:1 contrast ratio for $150 bucks, with another monitor with the exact same specs that costs $300, chances are VERY high that the more expensive monitor will look and work much better. Thus proving that the advertised numbers count for nothing.

 

[mikeaj]

^^ Above is spot on. Just an idea of how different response time specs can translate to much different real-world performance...

The following images, from tftcentral, are photographs taken of a little image quickly moving horizontally across various computer monitors, to see the pixel responsiveness of each. The left image is the best-case scenario and the right image is the worst-case scenario. The slower the monitor is in changing the state of the pixels, the more ghosting / smearing / whatever you want to call it, there is.


AOC i2353Ph - rated 5 ms


Asus ML239H - rated 5 ms


Dell U2311H - rated 8ms [wait a sec, that's "worse" than the AOC above]


NEC EA232WMI - rated 14ms [so obviously way worse than the AOC, right?]


BenQ XL2410T - rated 2ms [note the heavy dark shadow is over-aggressive overshoot]


Samsung 2233RZ - rated 3ms

I'm not ragging on AOC in particular, just one example. This is why you can't just look at the advertised spec and expect anything much in particular.

 

[Arizonian]

Thanks for those explanations. I knew about seek time but wasn't sure why some have 'Gray to Gray' or 'Black to Black' etc. Good clarifications.

 

[GregMD]

Thank you mikeaj for taking the time to answer this question. Your pictures were worth a thousand articles... Greg

 

[PCM2]

A very useful and in-depth read relevant to this thread is an article on my site entitled 'The factors affecting PC Monitor responsiveness'. Why you should always look beyond quoted response times.

Edit: Didn't realise this thread was so old.