dear farsight, need insight asap!

[budtki@verizon.net]

love the TPA, enormous fan, i've never had problems with TPA, my display was an old but good toshiba projection tv, it recently died, so i just bought a a huge led samsung flatscreen, it didn't have 240mhz but it's cmr is 480, the salesman said i might experience some ghost effect during exceptionally fast movements, i just wired it up(HD) and fired up tpa, and i now, for the first time have experienced flipper lag, worse yet, when the ball moves extremly fast(phantomflip)i get ghosteffect, i know i need an hdmi(highspeed)cable, but...with your knowledge(insight), is this an incorrectable problem for 120mhz users, is their a solution other then taking the tv back to the store and exchanging it for one that has 240mhz, are these problems specific to HD even with 240mhz? is the highspeed cable the answer? what is the answer?, my graphics are now amazing, all the tables that seemed graphically challanged are now beautiful, but now i have lag and the ghost effect, please reply asap as i may have to take this tv back and i only have a few days to decide.

 

[Carl Spiby]

Works fine on my 60hz TV, can't you disable 120hz and see if it remedy's it?

 

[pezpunk]

the lag comes in when you have a lot of post-processing turned on. for watching television or dvds or whatever, there is also a delay, but the television syncs up the sound so you never notice. during gaming, as you are discovering, it is noticeable BIG TIME.

the solution is to turn off every graphical doodad in the menus. put the framerate at 60. turn off noise reduction or smoothing or any other feature that is mentioned on the box. that will greatly reduce the lag you're experiencing. (and make the image look better to boot. television feature marketing is total BS right now, it's a real shame)

some TVs offer a "gaming mode" that automatically tries to reduce lag to a minimum.

My story: I used to play Pinball Hall of Fame (Wii) on a Samsung DLP, and it was good. Then I bought a new flatscreen TV with a high framerate and all the latest features, and the game became completely unplayable with humongous flipper lag, and the ball would disappear whenever it was moving faster than a crawl.

By sheer luck, the tv i bought (a Sharp) did happen to have a Gaming mode (i think Samsungs do too now). I turned it on (and i turned off all the other features) and I was astounded. My all-time high scores doubled overnight, because not only was the lag I noticed gone, but the lag that I experienced that I didn't even consciously notice on my old Samsung was also gone.

again: both the ghosting and lag you are experiencing are due to the "features" of the tv like 120hz, motion clarity, quadpixel, smartcolor, clearmotion, etc. -- seriously turn ALL that stuff off, and enable "gaming mode" if your tv has it.

 

[Deathtickle]

Ive always stayed away from LG and Samsungs for anything to do with gaming.

 

[freezy]

I think Samsung calls it "gamer mode", where all the "optimizations" are disabled in favor of no latency. I have a Samsung in my cab and by enabling this I have no lag whatsoever.

 

[Soluzar]

My Samsung TV has a "gaming mode" which works fine for me. I play music games and pinball (reaction-sensitive genre) on it without problems. Mind you, my TV does not have a 120Hz mode or a lot of the other (total BS in my opinion) enhancement modes that some have, and it's only a 32" panel. I don't have room for anything much bigger.

 

[Carl Spiby]

120hz is horrible in my opinion, makes everything look unnaturally smooth.

 

[brakel]

120hz is horrible in my opinion, makes everything look unnaturally smooth.

I think 120hz on its own looks fine. Its the Cinemotion or other smoothing interpolation that the TVs do that creates the so called soap opera effect.