Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

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alamone
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by alamone »

1080P Bodnar lag tester results (all measured from the top bar)

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Dell U2211H 22" e-IPS monitor, 1080P native - 3.1 ms

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Mitsubishi RDT234WX - 23" AH-IPS monitor, 1080P native - 3.4 ms

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ASUS VG278H - 27" 120hz TN monitor, 1080P native - 4.2 ms

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Panasonic TC-L37E3- 37" Alpha-IPS HDTV, 1080P native - 8.3 ms

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Seiki SE39UY04 - 39" S-PVA HDTV, upscaling to 2160P - 58.1 ms

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Sony KDL-55W900A 55" S-PVA HDTV, 1080P native, game-original mode - 17.6 ms
Last edited by alamone on Sat Aug 31, 2013 10:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
shinjig
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by shinjig »

I wanted to try and run this test on a CRT monitor to see what results that I would get with that so I could compare them to my LCDs.

However they only output 720p and 1080p (I got one of each). My HDFury3 will change it to analog and component, but it'll still maintain the original resolution of 720p and 1080p. Are there any cheap solutions I can try that'll reduce the resolution to a computer resolution without lag? Like 1024X768? I know the new HDFury4 supposively allows that, but I don't know what kind of lag that has itself and I don't want to spend $400-$500 just to do this simple test.
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blizzz
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by blizzz »

alamone wrote:1080P Bodnar lag tester results (all measured from the top bar)

Image
Dell U2211H 22" e-IPS monitor, 1080P native - 3.1 ms
The U2211H was tested as 15.6ms by tftcentral with a CRT comparison. That's quite a big difference.

Edit: I wonder if it is possible to see a difference if I put the monitor next to my ASUS VG248 (2ms) to check if it's 3 or 16ms. But I guess even if I could see a difference it would most likely just be my imagination because I expect one monitor to be slower.
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marqs
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by marqs »

shinjig wrote:I wanted to try and run this test on a CRT monitor to see what results that I would get with that so I could compare them to my LCDs.

However they only output 720p and 1080p (I got one of each). My HDFury3 will change it to analog and component, but it'll still maintain the original resolution of 720p and 1080p. Are there any cheap solutions I can try that'll reduce the resolution to a computer resolution without lag? Like 1024X768? I know the new HDFury4 supposively allows that, but I don't know what kind of lag that has itself and I don't want to spend $400-$500 just to do this simple test.
Would you really want to test a standard CRT monitor, which is practically lagless (as opposed to e.g. 100/120Hz CRT TVs)? The response time of phospors is a couple hundred microseconds, so the tester would probably show something like 0.4ms, 7.9ms and 15.4ms from top to bottom bars.
shinjig
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by shinjig »

exactly, I want to test it so I can get a baseline of what I would be comparing it to when I test my LCDs.
shinjig
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by shinjig »

Ok I took a chance and just tried the HDFury to the old CRT computer monitor and it accepted the signal fine (used the 720p model of the tester).

Results were
Top .08
Middle 7.8
Bottom 15.4

So I'm happy with that, and now knowing that I know that I shouldn't be taking the "middle" or "average lag". Just take the top score.
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marqs
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by marqs »

shinjig wrote:So I'm happy with that, and now knowing that I know that I shouldn't be taking the "middle" or "average lag". Just take the top score.
Top score alone shows worst-case latency for a display. If you subtract 7.5ms and 15ms from middle and bottom bars, you can calculate average latency (which differs from worst-case number with plasmas and some LCDs).
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system11
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by system11 »

Do they not do a unit which is switchable between 720P and 1080P yet?
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alamone
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by alamone »

You would think they would add a simple rocker switch or something to change the resolution, instead of having to buy two bloody devices.
Also, the button they use is really annoying to keep holding down, so I replaced it with a on/off rocker switch as you can see dangling from my device.
shinjig
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by shinjig »

or you could plug it into a usb port then you don't have to keep on holding down the button.
alamone
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by alamone »

After a mishap with a dangling cable scratching a LCD,
I am very careful not to have cables anywhere near the front of LCD screens anymore.
ZellSF
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by ZellSF »

Late to the party, but finally gotten one of these. Fun measuring stuff:

1: My Panasonic plasma is much laggier than I thought it would be at 40ms. I thought it was somewhere in the 16-32ms range. On the positive side, that means I can make my next TV an upgrade. On the negative side, I'm still waiting for good affordable OLED displays.

2: My Panasonic plasma also has an entirely useless game mode. Regardless of if the input is interlaced or not the difference in input lag isn't statistically significant (less than 2ms). All it does it over-saturate colors and disable aspect ratio control. Actually not surprised over this result, but nice to confirm it.

3: My DVDO VP50 adds about 6-7ms of lag. Excepted, but nice to have confirmation. I haven't tested interlaced since I trust the 24ms number quoted for the game mode that looks half decent.

4: My Panasonic plasma does not seem to add any input lag over its base input lag when deinterlacing. I suspected as much but I would hope to be wrong. I would rather route interlaced content through the DVDO VP50, but another frame in addition to the inherent lag of the DVDO VP50...

5: My Pioneer VSX-LX52 AVR adds no input lag when component is run through it, it mangles the picture for 240p sources in some way, but it does it instantly.
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Xyga
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by Xyga »

It's known to be harsher with plasmas. For a time hdtvtest.co.uk did both the camera an LB tests to compare, check their reviews database.
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Einzelherz
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by Einzelherz »

ZellSF wrote:Late to the party, but finally gotten one of these. Fun measuring stuff:

1: My Panasonic plasma is much laggier than I thought it would be at 40ms. I thought it was somewhere in the 16-32ms range. On the positive side, that means I can make my next TV an upgrade. On the negative side, I'm still waiting for good affordable OLED displays.

2: My Panasonic plasma also has an entirely useless game mode. Regardless of if the input is interlaced or not the difference in input lag isn't statistically significant (less than 2ms). All it does it over-saturate colors and disable aspect ratio control. Actually not surprised over this result, but nice to confirm it.

3: My DVDO VP50 adds about 6-7ms of lag. Excepted, but nice to have confirmation. I haven't tested interlaced since I trust the 24ms number quoted for the game mode that looks half decent.

4: My Panasonic plasma does not seem to add any input lag over its base input lag when deinterlacing. I suspected as much but I would hope to be wrong. I would rather route interlaced content through the DVDO VP50, but another frame in addition to the inherent lag of the DVDO VP50...

5: My Pioneer VSX-LX52 AVR adds no input lag when component is run through it, it mangles the picture for 240p sources in some way, but it does it instantly.
So lots of information... except what model the Panny is.
Exidna
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by Exidna »

Xyga wrote:It's known to be harsher with plasmas. For a time hdtvtest.co.uk did both the camera an LB tests to compare, check their reviews database.
It is not "harsher" on plasmas - plasmas have inherently higher latency than LCDs, CRTs, or OLEDs.
Plasmas update the image globally - they buffer a frame then update the entire panel at once. (or at least in <1ms)
The minimum latency possible at the top position would be 16.67ms at 60Hz for a Plasma display with absolutely zero processing latency.
Of course like all digital displays, there is going to be some amount of latency on top of that.
If a Plasma TV had 23.33ms internal processing delays, the meter would read 40ms at the top and 40ms at bottom of the screen.

CRTs, LCDs, and OLEDs scan the image from top-to-bottom, which means they can start drawing the image line-by-line as it is received, rather than waiting to buffer an entire frame before the panel can be refreshed.
With a CRT that has effectively zero latency, at 60Hz they should measure ~0ms latency at the very first line on-screen, and ~16.67ms for the very last line on-screen. (1000/60 = 16.67ms)

With an LCD or OLED display, you will typically have the same 16.67ms difference between the top and bottom of the screen at 60Hz, but there are probably additional processing delays on top of that, affecting the top and bottom measurements equally.
So if they had a 23.33ms processing delay it would measure 23.33ms at the top of the screen and 40ms at the bottom.

However it's also possible to buffer the frame and do a fast scan-out with an LCD or OLED. (and apparently some LCD/OLED displays can refresh globally too)
So you would have that 16.67ms minimum latency like a Plasma TV because you have to buffer the frame, and then you might scan out the image in say 8.33ms total rather than 16.67ms.
For an LCD that had zero latency but did an accelerated scan-out of 8.33ms, it would measure 16.67ms at the top and the bottom would be 25ms.
If that display had 23.33ms processing delays, it would measure 40ms at the top like the plasma, but 48.33ms at the bottom.

Average latency measurements are meaningless, and the middle reading with the Bodnar tester doesn't really tell us anything useful about the properties of the display.
The top measurement on its own tells us approximately how much processing delay the display has.
The top and bottom measurements together can give us useful information about how the panel is updated and what the maximum latency should be.

OLEDs have a lot of potential for gaming - they could be the closest thing to a CRT as far as latency and motion blur is concerned, but I have no hope of that happening when LG are the only company mass-producing TV-sized panels.
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by Xyga »

Well yes but the thing about the LB tester supposedly is that it expects a level of brightness to trigger, and the early/rising subframes of plamas wouldn't be bright enough, the LB sensor therefore catches it late, that's the story.
Placebo or not, since most testers who had the chance to try that didn't find the LB figures to reflect what they felt in practice, they also suspected the human eye to be able to partially 'see' and react before the plasma's full frame cycle is done.
Whatever truth or BS there is behind this, plasmas are now collector items, it doesn't matter much anymore.
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RGB0b
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by RGB0b »

How does this device compare to using the 240p stopwatch test and splitting the signal between a CRT / flat-screen? Is it worth me buying one for testing?
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by Ed Oscuro »

HDTVtest never made clear what they thought was the more important factor: Plasmas needing to buffer a frame to draw all fields simultaneously, or their unproven brightness level theory. For what it's worth they mention both possibilities in their section on plasma TV lag, but they aren't clear that they're separate possibilities (they aren't good on specifics about the buffering and raster update process, either).

Using SMTT 2.0 in addition to the Bodnar would help put some of these questions to rest I think.
retrorgb wrote:How does this device compare to using the 240p stopwatch test and splitting the signal between a CRT / flat-screen? Is it worth me buying one for testing?
The Bodnar should give accurate and precisely repeatable readings over many uses. The CRT test introduces too many variables to be as reliable. Multi-monitor tests might not be totally worthless but there may be uncertainty around a full frame, as you must account for screen placement and camera sensor readout. There may be other sources of error too; some people have raised concerns about unsynchronized split feeds.

SMTT 2.0 should be one of the best methods but it's not clear if those readings are directly comparable to the Bodnar tester, so my thought has been that most people should look for Bodnar test results. However having SMTT 2.0 results alongside would be ideal.
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by Fudoh »

Plasmas needing to buffer a frame to draw all fields simultaneously
Some LCDs do this as well. My big Sony only has minimal difference between the top and bottom reading.

It's not this hard to adjust the readings to get results that are comparable to the older CRT comparion test. I've done both extensively and eventually I just adjusted the readings from Leo's handheld device. You really just need to do this once to get a baseline on what the difference is. After that the handheld is much easier to use of course)

Without going into any theoretical details (read the SMTT manual for that) I think that the CRT comparison test (when done with enough test samples and averaging your readings) gives results closest to what your eyes would perceive as well.
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Re: Leo's exciting hand held LAG TEST device - out now !

Post by Exidna »

Xyga wrote:Well yes but the thing about the LB tester supposedly is that it expects a level of brightness to trigger, and the early/rising subframes of plamas wouldn't be bright enough, the LB sensor therefore catches it late, that's the story.
Placebo or not, since most testers who had the chance to try that didn't find the LB figures to reflect what they felt in practice, they also suspected the human eye to be able to partially 'see' and react before the plasma's full frame cycle is done.
Whatever truth or BS there is behind this, plasmas are now collector items, it doesn't matter much anymore.
Well a sub-frame on its own isn't an image anyway.
I guess that being pure white on a pure black background would mean that only the final sub-frame would actually be used with the Bodnar lag tester on most plasmas.
However since it's a sub-frame, the latency that this "adds" must be less than one frame.
Late-model Plasmas were pushing out all sub-frames in <1ms. (Panasonic's "2500Hz" and "3000Hz" models with their "Focused Field Drive")
And the 3D-capable Panasonic Plasmas drove things in reverse order so that the brightest sub-frames were drawn first.

Plasmas just weren't very low latency displays. People were just making excuses.
I often heard people say that Plasmas were "CRT-like" but there was really nothing CRT-like about them at all, other than the fact that they were emissive displays.
Fudoh wrote:
Plasmas needing to buffer a frame to draw all fields simultaneously
Some LCDs do this as well. My big Sony only has minimal difference between the top and bottom reading.
I imagine that the larger the display is, the more noticeable skew resulting from the scanned image becomes to most people.
That said, where I've actually noticed it most is on phone/tablet displays since you have such direct interaction with them, and you're often scrolling the whole screen at once.

Globally-updating the image or using an accelerated scan-out is a good thing... just not for gamers that want the absolute lowest latency possible.
I'd love to see an OLED display capable of switching between global and scanning modes.
Scanning modes on OLED also have the advantage of being able to reduce image persistence without any additional latency by simply reducing how many lines are held on-screen simultaneously.
It's possible for OLED to best CRT in nearly every way possible right now - the main reason it's not is because TV manufacturers aren't focused on that sort of thing, and LG in particular is apparently insistent that their OLED displays should not flicker.
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