Why aren't gamers worshipping at the altar of strobing?

[flood]

well at least we're past the days where a "gaming" monitor is a piece of crap 60hz tn overdrived so they can advertise 1ms

[GameLifter]

Strobing is incredible but I mainly use G-Sync at 144hz for the smoothness. Also, the motion clarity on the Swift is passable for me when ULMB is off. While strobing is awesome I would rather see a new screen technology come along that doesn't inherently have motion blur like LCDs or OLEDs do. Plasmas have very little motion blur and it's a shame they are gone. I picked up a budget Samsung plasma recently and it's great. The motion clarity is better than any non strobed LCD I've seen and it doesn't have to lose brightness or have frame skips to pull it off.

One day we'll have the perfect screen for motion clarity but strobed LCDs will do for now.

[SeeNoWeevil]

Strobing is incredible but I mainly use G-Sync at 144hz for the smoothness. Also, the motion clarity on the Swift is passable for me when ULMB is off. While strobing is awesome I would rather see a new screen technology come along that doesn't inherently have motion blur like LCDs or OLEDs do. Plasmas have very little motion blur and it's a shame they are gone. I picked up a budget Samsung plasma recently and it's great. The motion clarity is better than any non strobed LCD I've seen and it doesn't have to lose brightness or have frame skips to pull it off.

One day we'll have the perfect screen for motion clarity but strobed LCDs will do for now.

I always chose LCD over plasma, oblivious to motion blur. So I guess I can count myself in with those who just didn't think it was a problem. I agree with those who say people have adapted to the blur. When playing 30fps only console games (Bloodborne) I can feel myself essentially 'switching off' my visual concentration every time I swing the camera round, and then refocus when it settles.

[SS4]

The problem with plasma though is that they have much higher input lag compared to LCD. So even with their smoothness and rich colors, they arent always suited for some really fast pace game where input lag can make a world of difference.

[Glide]

The problem with plasma though is that they have much higher input lag compared to LCD. So even with their smoothness and rich colors, they arent always suited for some really fast pace game where input lag can make a world of difference.

A lot of that depends on the testing methodology.
If people are testing with the Leo Bodnar lag tester, it displays three bands for measuring latency.
With LCD panels, if you use the top/middle bars, you will get faster latency measurements than if you were to use the bottom bar, since LCD displays are updated top-to-bottom.

Plasmas will show the same latency for all areas of the screen.
You may have an LCD TV which measures 20ms at the top, 28ms in the middle, and 36ms at the bottom, compared to a plasma that measures 40ms everywhere.
So they're not necessarily that much slower, it just depends on the test.

There are a lot of other reasons that I would avoid plasma displays though, especially for gaming.
Though they have maybe 4-8ms persistence depending on the model, I don't find them very good for motion handling at all. Too many artifacts.
And as a whole, they are generally quite dim displays compared to LCDs. Samsung's last generation or two of plasmas are the exception to this, since those models were roughly twice as bright - if not brighter - compared to any other plasma.

[GameLifter]

The problem with plasma though is that they have much higher input lag compared to LCD. So even with their smoothness and rich colors, they arent always suited for some really fast pace game where input lag can make a world of difference.

A lot of that depends on the testing methodology.
If people are testing with the Leo Bodnar lag tester, it displays three bands for measuring latency.
With LCD panels, if you use the top/middle bars, you will get faster latency measurements than if you were to use the bottom bar, since LCD displays are updated top-to-bottom.

Plasmas will show the same latency for all areas of the screen.
You may have an LCD TV which measures 20ms at the top, 28ms in the middle, and 36ms at the bottom, compared to a plasma that measures 40ms everywhere.
So they're not necessarily that much slower, it just depends on the test.

There are a lot of other reasons that I would avoid plasma displays though, especially for gaming.
Though they have maybe 4-8ms persistence depending on the model, I don't find them very good for motion handling at all. Too many artifacts.
And as a whole, they are generally quite dim displays compared to LCDs. Samsung's last generation or two of plasmas are the exception to this, since those models were roughly twice as bright - if not brighter - compared to any other plasma.

Interesting. The input lag on the Samsung plasma I got is around 40ms and it's alright for most console games. The persistence you mentioned is probably about right as well. Better than most LCDs but can't beat strobed LCDs. As for brightness I don't have it turned up all the way and it's plenty good for a darker room. The deal breaker for most is burn-in. If an icon is on the screen for literally less than a minute it can stick but it will go away if you run the scrolling white bar or watch or play something else for a while. I did permanently burn in the battery indicator on Watch Dogs though but it's invisible during most normal viewing.

[SeeNoWeevil]

I really hope Sony don't drop Motionflow Impulse for their OLED sets. I can't go back to regular LCD.

[nimbulan]

I've only tried ULMB briefly, but the inconsistent ghosting really bothered me. It feels like the strobing actually makes it worse on the top and bottom of the screen and isn't worth the extra sharpness in the middle for me. Even if it didn't have this problem, I find G-Sync to be a far larger improvement to my gaming experience, not to mention the difficulty of maintaining a framerate high enough for strobing to work well in modern games.

[Falkentyne]

This is interesting.
The ghosting (what you are describing is "strobe crosstalk") is worse at the top and bottom of the screen than the middle, in ULMB mode?
I didn't think that would happen. Lightboost mode, which was the predecessor to ULMB, used accelerated scanout, and was set up so the top of the screen was perfect and had the absolute best image quality (literally NO ghosting whatsoever and NO overdrive artifacts at all on 24" lightboost monitors; the 27"s didn't fare as well), while the bottom of the screen had the inverse ghosting (the bottom looked the worst). Although on the desktop, the center of the screen showed the least "normal" ghosting while the top and bottom would show the primary and secondary trails of certain objects (like the mouse cursor), with it being much worse on the bottom than the top. It's important to remember that distinction between "inverse ghosting" (best quality at the top of the screen) in Lightboost, and Normal ghosting (best quality at the middle).

ULMB isn't like this?

Lightboost used accelerated scanout and per-line overdrive to accomplish this, but this caused a hit in image quality and sometimes a scanlines effect.

[Glide]

Wait, what? I thought the whole point of ULMB was that the strobe was synchronized with the LCD panel, and the backlight would only switch on when all transitions were completed.

That sounds awful.