Panasonic PT-AR100U Lag Test Results
March 20, 2012 | 
Author
Greetings,
Lag results are in, and they are VERY good! This LCD keeps up with all the DLP’s I have seen, perfect for gamers. No 3D, but with virtually no lag…who cares?!?! I have put in minimal gaming as of yet, but it looks good thus far…review coming soon. See for yourself:
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Hi Ebenezer Stooge,
I’d like to share the same thoughts that I expressed on one of Pete’s reviews regarding your input lag testing methodology and some questions I have:
1) What is the display latency of your laptop’s display at the resolution that you were using during the test? Even laptop displays, because they are LCDs, can have a few frames of latency due to image processing or simply a buffer used between communication from the graphics chip to the display. This time needs to be added onto any of the results that you publish.
2) What was the resolution that you were outputting to the projector? Did you try testing the latency at different resolutions? Obviously some resolutions will have more latency due to scaling.
3) Did you try any other latency timers for this test? The one at flatpanels.dk cannot be guaranteed to have accurate results because it runs through Adobe Flash, which does not guarantee every frame to be fresh. (this can cause two successive frames to have the same time displayed). Also, the HTML version on their website is problematic, as the display framerate of javascript code is sometimes limited in web browsers. I’m running at 85Hz right now and firefox is capping the latency timer at about 60Hz.
This is a great tool for accurately testing input lag:
http://www.smtt.thomasthiemann.com/
Please check out this extensive article for more details on lag testing methodologies:
http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/specials/inputlag/inputlag.html
Thanks,
Allen
Hi Allen,
I use a desktop computer and output the image from the video card to the projector, and to my monitor as well. I also use the same exact HDMI cable, with the same length. Since they are coming from the same video card, they are both displaying the same resolution as well. When I get another 1080p projector in I will test with both tools and let you know if there are any discrepancies. Thank you for the information, I will look into the testing method.
Aaah, I see it wasn’t a laptop — regardless, any LCD that you use as the baseline will have its own latency. If you can grab an old CRT, they typically have around 500ns (0.0005ms) of latency (immeasurable by most means and totally irrelevant. Makes for a great baseline number)… But to test with a CRT, you typically need to use a tool like the SMTT that will output to two resolutions, unless you can find a CRT that displays 1920 x 1080.
Thanks for your interest, I’m looking forward to future reviews!
Allen