LED or LCD whats best for gaming?

[PizzaKat]

Was just wondering what the lesser of two evils. I have no room for a CRT so was just wondering which I should set up to?

[RARusk]

It doesn't matter too much if it is LED or LCD as long as you can get one with a fast response time. The average flatscreen is 5ms. Aim for about 2ms or faster if you can find one. I currently use a ViewSonic flatscreen with VGA, DVI, and HDMI inputs with a 2ms response time and it works pretty good although I prefer a tube (those are getting harder to find now and OLED is still way too expensive and has durability problems).

[Rickstilwell1]

I've tried a Samsung, Sharp and Magnavox LCD and all of them had no noticeable lag.

[DeputyMoniker]

I know you didn't ask about plasma but I game on my Samsung plasma through this and I've had no lag problems:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003NS0UUQ/ref=oh_details_o02_s03_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[retroman]

I know you didn't ask about plasma but I game on my Samsung plasma through this and I've had no lag problems:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003NS0UUQ/ref=oh_details_o02_s03_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I agree with this quote. I have a LCD, LED and a plasma Tv. I also find that my Plasma Tv is the best one to game on. The others are not bad with the LCD being the worst. Plasma TV's have the fastest refresh rate of any other TV out there at 600mhz. Which they also have a few do's and dont's when you use them. Nothing big, but a few things you will need to look up and learn about if you get a plasma.

[kupomogli]

LED is worth getting over LCD. The image quality is better. Anyways, like others have said, you want to get a television that has lower input lag than higher. RARtusk is a bit off on his explanation though. The best for input lag is a PC monitor, which the size is lower than 27".

If you're looking for an HDTV though, you'll want as low of an input lag as you can find. While 50ms may seem like a lot, most people won't notice it. If you're looking for the best brand of tvs when it comes to input lag, you really want to get a Sony TV. The newest Sony HDTVs have the lowest input lag by far out of any other tv and the quality is great.

Here's a couple other things you'll want to have for your HDTV if you're interested in watching television on it as well. On HDTVs, the image isn't quite as fast as an SDTV so it judders. If getting any TV, you'll want a 240hz television. The 240hz mode adds different modes to it like a clear motion mode, etc, etc, depending on the tv type. When watching television, it input lag, but it increases the amount of images and reduces that judder look like you'll see when watching 60hz. A good comparison would be something like a 60fps game in comparison to a 20fps game. When using the 240hz mode on tv, the image is smoother, like a 60fps game, while not using 240hz is like a 20fps game.

Here's the display lag database. It shows a list of what the lowest amount of input lag on a lot of newer tvs as well as older tvs. If you're searching for a specific tv size or a certain criteria, you can reorder it by the search option at the top which will reorder the list. http://www.displaylag.com/display-database/

Now another thing I'll mention is the 3D. Now sure there's 3D movies, etc, but also maybe you've heard of this, but you can switch two glasses so they have both the left lenses, and the other has both the right lenses so playing a splitscreen game one player can see the top or left only, the other person can see the bottom or right only. So playing a splitscreen game full screen on the same tv. Now it's easier with passive glasses as the lenses themselves can be pushed out and replaced. Active glasses however are either battery charged or rechargeable and it's based on wiring, so there's switching wires and soddering involved instead of switching lenses. Active glasses get better 3D images than passive if you're interested in watching 3D though as well. Here's a link about making active glasses into left/left, and right/right like I explained above. http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/52443/resolved-howto-re-wire-sony-simulview-3d-glasses-for-dual-play-support

Here's the latest tv I've purchased and I personally think it's amazing. The Sony KDL-55W900A. It was a little expensive but I got $200 back and a free year of Hulu and Netflix, so I pretty much saved $400 from it, so with that it only a couple hundred dollars more expensive than something else I might be far less interested in, but it was worth it. The image quality is great, very low input lag(so long as you turn on the option to reduce it in the image settings, game mode like option,) internet tv so I no longer have to turn on a console or another device to use Netflix or Hulu. This one uses active glasses and came with four glasses that use batteries(I still need to sell these on Ebay and purchase some that are rechargeable.)

*edit*

About the input lag, most people aren't going to know the lag if it's under 50ms, but if you were to play on a tv with less input lag than another right afterwards, it'll be slight, but if you're one who notices slight framerate issues, not huge drops that most people will know, but slight drops that most people wouldn't notice. If you're one of those people then you would notice the difference even those it's very slight.

People mentioned plasma. The 600hz refreshes images quicker, but will still have some judder on quick moving scenes. It's not as good as a good 240hz mode that makes images smoother. Most newer tvs have good 240hz modes. Plasma is far better than a 60hz tv though. The good thing about plasma tvs is they're cheap and they've got image quality as good as LEDs. The one thing about plasma you'll need to know though is you'll want to spend atleast 200 hours breaking in the plasma. Newer plasmas are better about burn in than in the past, but it's still a problem. For the first 200 hours you'll want to either use a DVD or leave the television on a channel that has constant programming for you to leave it on and then use the zoom option to remove the logo. Even after breaking it in, if you play games that have colors or images that stay on the screen for more than an hour, you'll want to use the screen wipe feature of the tv for a few minutes to 15 minutes when you're done to remove the residual burn in before turning the tv off(residual burn in isn't complete burn in, but it'll stay there if the pixels don't get that out of memory.)

[Tanooki]

LCD or LED doesn't matter, it's just how they're lit up, and the LED is superior in brightness among other things.

As other said, you need delay (input lag) to be as low as possible, and yes the Sony is the best, but you'll also at retail be paying 2x the price of a non-Sony in a same or even larger size. I had to replace a TV in the last month my kid cracked that was super reliable a 26" Panasonic Viera LCD that was 7 years old.

I ended up getting a 29" Vizio.E291i-A1 (i for internal wifi) and I used this website that lists the various tvs on the market and response times. The vizio came in around at 25ms for response time (displaylag.com) while the best Sony is 17ms and very few Sonys and less Toshibas are above that Vizio I picked up. My old Panasonic had such an amazingly low lag and this one I feel no different about and I am sensitive to it as I have a 46" LED Samsung that's so wretched I can't even play Super Mario Bros 3 on it without screwing up stuff a five year old wouldn't.

The TV I got is $250 at retail (best buy.) The features are incredible on it, and it does have a qualified Game Mode that disables every processing feature which gets the response time better than the base 25ms. I can feel the difference with overly picky shit like Gitaroo Man on PS2 and the Gradius shooters there too, stuff a little less intense either ON/OFF gaming mode is fine with 8/16bit platformers like Mario. I can't more highly recommend it if you're not after some huge beast 40"+ sized TV. The picture quality and color on this Vizio is insanely good too and even the speakers are solid as well.


I forgot to note something (edit here) both my old TV and this one are 720p/1080i 60HZ, the Samsung that lags bad is 120hz at least. I've found the best response time TVs I've run across in most cases are 60hz because a big killer in input lag is the new HD tvs that need to take the lowly old 240i level console input and scale it upwards to where it can display it and each multiple of 60, 120, 240, adds another rotation of processing lag on top of the next.