Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Someone mentioned the latencies for gaming, but also I had a 4K TV as a monitor briefly that had horrible latency for typing, even. Enough of a delay between hitting a key and the terminal printing to throw off my cadence.

Only electronic device I’ve ever returned.

Also they tend to have stronger than necessary backlights. It might be possible to calibrate around this issue, but the thing is designed to be viewed from the other side of a room. You are at the mercy of however low they decided to let it go.

View on HN

You could probably circumvent this by putting the display into Gaming Mode, which most TVs have. It removes all the extra processing that TVs add to make the image "nicer". These processes add a hell of a lot of latency, which is obviously just fine for watching TV, but horrible for gaming or using as a pc monitor.

It was a while ago (5 years?), so I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure I was aware of game mode at the time and played with the options enough to convince myself that it wasn’t there.

> horrible latency for typing

Was this the case even after enabling the TVs "game mode" that disables a lot of the latency inducing image processing (e.g. frame interpolation).

game mode is a scam. it breaks display quality on most TVs. and still doesn't respond as fast as a PC monitor with <1ms latencies.... it might drop itself to 2 or 3 which is still 2x or 3x atleast slower.

you can think 'but thats inhumanly fast, you wont notice it' but in reality, this is _very_ noticeable in games like counter-strike where hand-eye coordination, speed and pinpoint accuracy are key. if you play such games a lot then you will feel it if the latency goes above 1ms.

Where are you finding monitors with <1ms input lag? The lowest measured here is 1.7ms: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tests/inputs/input-lag

false advertisements :D

Most people lack an understanding of displays and therefore what they are quoting and are in fact quoting the vendors claimed pixel response time as the input lag.

It’s gotta be the most commonly mixed up things I’ve seen in the last twenty years as an enthusiast.

well atleast i didn't misunderstand my own lack of understanding :D ... -

the part of feeling the difference in response times, that's true though, but I must say, the experience is a bit dated ^^ i see more high resolution monitors have generally quite slow response times.

<1ms was from CRT times :D which was my main counter-striker days. I do find noticable 'lag' still on TV vs. monitor though but i've only tested on HD (1080p) - own only 1 4k monitor and my own age-induced-latency by now far exceeds my display's latency :D

> <1ms was from CRT times

I still use CRTs :) However more than input lag, for me its motion. Which is driven by panel response times and I just cant stand even the best modern OLEDs for motion unless its 240hz and up.

> I do find noticable 'lag' still on TV vs. monitor though

Yeah you likely will to be honest. Most even average monitors will be single digit, 1-2ms maybe at most. Depending upon TV model, game mode may only get you to low double digits. High end panels should get you to pretty low single digits though, like 4-5ms.

They measure in a particular way that includes half a frame of unavoidable lag. There are reasons to do it that way, but it's not objectively the "right" way to do it.

Rtings basically gives you a number that represents average lag without screen tearing. If you measure at the top of your screen and/or tolerate tearing then the numbers get significantly smaller, and a lot of screens can in fact beat 1ms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com