Delay on my 'good' TV?

Question

Alrighty, so here's my problem. We just got a 47 inch Samsung DLP TV, and naturally as a gamer I was excited to hook up the gaming consoles and play my heart out.

The problem is that when I play, there's a noticeable delay. I thought at one point I solved my problem when I found a 'game mode' setting. It improved the problem, but didn't eliminate it.

People have told me that it's just moving to a big screen makes it take longer for you to move or look around since there's more area to cover, but that isn't it. The problem isn't that it's slowed, it's the time between a command on the controller and the reaction on screen.

Personally, I've found that good old fashioned tube TV's have done the trick far better than this new TV so far.

Anybody have a solution for this problem?

Answer 1

Most Tv's produced today used a fixed-pixel technology (LCD, Plasma, DLP). This means the sizes of the pixels are "fixed" and the actual resolution of the display is "fixed". This is unlike a tube TV which uses a scanning circuit to move electron beams around the screen. When you have a signal that's a lower resolution than your display size, you either deal with smaller viewing area or you add circuitry to upconvert the signal to make it full size.

Tube Tv's don't have this...there aren't any "pixels" per-say on a tube..the electron beams can be moved around the screen at different rates..meaning if you have a 1080i tube and you feed it a 525i signal..it'll reduce the scan-rate so the 525i picture takes up the whole screen...sharp comparsion to the upsampling technology.

The reason you have delay on DLP is just the way the technology works. These things are made to display HD content, so any non-HD content (or content that doesn't match the native resolution), has to be converted so it does...and THIS is where you get the delay.

There's only really one way around this...make sure your gaming system can output full HD and make sure it's hooked up.

If you don't have a HD console (like, lets say you're playing XBox or old-school nintendo), then you're pretty much out of luck, you'll have to keep an old-fashioned tube TV around to maintain low-latency display.

Answer 2

From your description, it sounds like there must be some kind of digital processing going on in the TV that slightly delays the transfer of the picture from the signal in to the screen.  The "game mode" probably switches out some of the processing to speed things up.  All I can think of would be to contact the manufacturer and see if they have any ideas.