TV Lag
Of course, you’ll all remember the woeful day back in 2003 when we discovered that Kris’ beautiful shiny new flatscreen lcd tv had a lag problem, rendering it unsuitable for Halo.
Now, many of us also saw the lag on the flatscreen at Brandon’s the other week.
I used to just be of the philosophy, just stick with CRTs when it came to solving this problem. However, now that CRT technology is going out of style, it’s become harder to find them (that is, unless your grandfather just happens to decide he’s over his 30″ HDTV Sony Trinitron).
So I’ve been looking into it, and it seems that the rest of the world figured out about this problem around 2006. IGN wrote up an article on the problem here. It looks like the main problem is that if you have an HDTV of a certain resolution, and it receives a signal from an Xbox of a different resolution, it does some image processing in order to make the signal look better, but that produces lag.
So tips and solutions from the article:
- Test the TV before you buy it… Guitar Hero II for 360 and PS3 apparently has a dedicated lag test modem, but you can also test it yourself a number of ways. (One person set up a network game between a CRT TV and the HDTV and went to the Terminal in Halo 2 and measured where the train was at the same time)
[img]http://gearmedia.ign.com/gear/image/article/720/720303/VGA_1153522749-000.jpg[/img]
- Some newer TVs have a Game mode which skips most of the processing.
- Avoid DLP, especially from Samsung, which seems to be one of the worst laggers according to IGN reader responses.
- Sony and Toshiba seem to have much less lag problems.
- Try the VGA output, which may skip the processing.
- Try to get your box to output to the TV’s native resolution. This is probably easiest with a 360, but the Xbox has some different display modes also.
Alright, this is what I’ve found… what do you guys think?
