Blurring on cheap LCD TVs - usual?
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 - 5:14pm
I have a cheap TV, a Vizio VX37L, which was my entry level puchase to get into HD.
One thing I notice on it, particularly with videogames, is a kind of motion blur. It's more noticable with some games than others, and is particulaly vivid in Final Fantasy XIII. It's usually most noticeable while moving the camera in a 3rd person game, when pretty much every pixel is changing.
My 360's connected via HDMI, and runs in 720p (the best my cheap TV will do).
My question - is this endemic of LCD screens, or merely a poor feature of my cheap TV?
I'm thinking about upgrading the TV in the next year or so, so I'm going to dive into the big TV thread, but I figured I might get a quicker answer this way.
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LarryC wrote:
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It's probably the response rate of the LCD panel. You see different measures in Milliseconds. On our older Bravia there is some blur when going left / right. How noticeable it is depends on the game, but it blurs slightly during the quick motion.
Sometimes the LCD TVs have software to filter/sharpen the image for tv viewing that actually slows down the the panels response time whilte it processes the on screen images. This can get in the way when doing things beyond watching TV (i.e. playing games.) You might check to see if it has a Game Mode setting that is meant to improve the response time slightly (basically it turns off whatever software filtering is occuring I think).
Probably a confluence of small things, but it could actually be a defective panel. Likely not.
1. Since you have a 720p TV (meaning, the panel is actually 1376x768), everything has to be scaled. Scaling introduces some lag and, if the scaler isn't that good (i.e. cheap), it can produce calculation errors that could very easily show themselves as blur. Any other processing the TV does can exacerbate this. If you have it on "dynamic" mode instead of the flat color response, or have sharpness turned way up, or dynamic contrast ratio (I hate this one; it's insidious and never named what you think) or something like that, it just adds more layers of processing.
2. LCDs have a bit of an inherent motion blur problem that larger panels (i.e. not computer monitor size) have only very recently overcome, and then only at the nicer panels, although it's quickly trickling down.
3. As Irongut mentions, the response rate may not be that great.
4. Some higher-refresh panels (120Hz and above) have motion-smoothing algorithms that are on by default that can do very, very weird things to images, especially moving images, but I don't think Vizio makes a 37" 120Hz panel, so I doubt that's it.
5. Is it usually in pre-rendered cut-scenes? If so, it could be 3:2 pulldown errors from the 360. I've had this problem with Tales of Vesperia and other games, where although the game runs at 60Hz, the cut-scenes may be rendered at 24Hz and the 360 doesn't compensate. Drives me nuts, but some people don't even see it.
I would try game mode, as Irongut mentions; it may help. Also, a question, since I know you're an avid RB gamer: what is your configured pre-delay setting for video in RB? It might give some indication as to how much processing the TV is doing.
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Great info - I'll have a poke around in my TV's settings.
Cutscenes usually look pretty good - it's most noticable when I'm controlling the camera. Could be that I just notice it more when I'm in control though.
The RB lag was small enough that we've never needed to calibrate. I think we did the autocalibrate on RB2, but we never touched the settings on RB1 or any of the 3 GH games we've had over the years.
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LarryC wrote:
Just out of curiosity, the motion blur you're talking about is different than ghosting?
Edit: Your model has an 8ms response time. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're just going to have to live with the blur. You might be able to change some settings to mitigate it, but no LCD is perfect in regards to ghosting and blurring. You might want to check out the thread over at AVS Forums for specific settings to get the best picture from your tv (and turn off some unnecessary features, if there are any).
MilkmanDanimal wrote:
NSMike wrote:
http://steamcommunity.com/id/garion333
It's hard to answer these questions without seeing the blur.
garion is right, no LCD is completely blur-free. However, I have had TVs from different manufacturers. There is a certain, very subtle blurring that is just part of the technology. But some TVs also suffer from a far more exaggerated blurring that isn't endemic of LCDs (I had an awful Westinghouse that did this, which I replaced with a Vizio. Both had the same pixel response time, but the Vizio did not have the very visible, strong blurring of the Westinghouse).
We can't tell whether you're simply being sensitive to the normal LCD blurring that many people typically don't see, or just don't notice strongly enough to be bothered by it... or if you're seeing some other sort of blurring that is beyond that, like my old crappy Westy.
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