Blur Busters Forums

I recently upgraded my 1080p Sony TV which spent a lot of its time gaming at 60fps with BFI enabled, to a Samsung Q90R 4K HDR display, Samsung's flagship 4K TV. I noticed fairly early on that under very specific circumstances I could see some faint purplish ghosting coming from game geometry when panning the camera, which I now understand is inverse ghosting. This would show up only with the combination of 4K HDR 60fps in game mode and with BFI enabled and was only really noticeable in one specific, darker game. If I disable BFI, the issue is largely gone (still a faint trace of it if you really look for it), although obviously it could just be that the clearer motion allows the ghosting to be seen. It's almost impossible to spot in all my other HDR games. If I disable game mode entirely it's completely eradicated.

Now I understand in the quest for the best headline input lag figures, TV manufacturers are employing really aggressive pixel overdrive algorithms and this is almost certainly the cause of issues like this. As far as I'm aware no TV offers adjustment to this overdrive like gaming monitors do to tailor this mechanism. Would it be unreasonable to expect absolutely zero inverse ghosting on a display in game mode where input lag is the priority? Am I wasting my time pushing for a replacement panel or reporting it as an issue to the manufacturer? (I really do NOT want the hassle of boxing up a 65" TV and sorting the replacement if possible). It seems like they've tuned the overdrive to be as aggressive as possible where a small enough amount of ghosting is visible that the majority of users won't notice it. As far as I can see, reviewers don't specifically test ghosting in conjunction with low input lag picture modes either.

Thanks

SeeNoWeevil wrote:Would it be unreasonable to expect absolutely zero inverse ghosting on a display in game mode where input lag is the priority?

I think this is a VA panel? VA panels are popular with TVs due to their contrast ratios. Very bad pixel response in dark colors is a notorious issue with VA, and thus strong overdrive is needed, but that gives inverse ghosting.

Generally, when using a VA panel, in dark scenes you can expect either smearing/ghosting or inverse ghosting, depending on how the manufacturer chose to deal with the issue.

RealNC wrote:

SeeNoWeevil wrote:Would it be unreasonable to expect absolutely zero inverse ghosting on a display in game mode where input lag is the priority?

I think this is a VA panel? VA panels are popular with TVs due to their contrast ratios. Very bad pixel response in dark colors is a notorious issue with VA, and thus strong overdrive is needed, but that gives inverse ghosting.

Generally, when using a VA panel, in dark scenes you can expect either smearing/ghosting or inverse ghosting, depending on how the manufacturer chose to deal with the issue.

Yes, it's some type of VA panel I believe. Thanks for the response.