Ok.. this is going to be long winded but I really hope everyone stays with it and reads it.
I have the Leo Bodnar lag tester, I have tested many tvs with it so far, great device! All of the LCD/LED tvs I have tried it on show the top bar having the least amount of lag, followed by the middle and then the bottom having the highest.
Most sites either report the middle one or the average of them all. I personally feel we should be going by the bottom one ( the highest number ) because that is when the image is completed on the screen.
Now you may be asking yourself why should we care? Well it brings me to my point on the tester, it is NOT accurate for Plasmas. I currently have the following tvs( in various rooms at my place):
Samsung 65H8000 LED ( bottom bar 49ms)
Samsung 32D5000 LED ( Bottom bar 39ms)
Samsung S24D590P PC monitor ( Bottom bar 19ms)
Pioneer Elite pro-1150 Kuro ( All three bars read 41ms)
Ok so with that out of the way I have discovered something interesting, some may already know this but all bars on the plasma are the same. Also I tried the Kuro in Game Mode with game preference control on and it actually raised the input lag to 48ms!! In Pure mode it was 41ms, in PC mode it was 41ms. This is the 768p version of the tv, I also had in the past a Pro101, Pro110 and a Pro111. The 1080p panels form Pioneer were slower, that I can tell.
So I played games back and forth from the tvs listed above. Wanna know something interesting? The plasma feels about the same as the Samsung pc monitor that the lower bar reads 19ms. I thought this cant be. I am very sensitive to lag and even moreso sensitive to blur and uniformity on displays. The Pioneer Elite plasma has the best uniformity of the bunch, it doesnt blur like the lcds either.
Yet I dont get why if the Plasma reads 41ms why it felt as fast as the pc monitor at 19ms (bottom bar). I looked into it and found out on HDTV.test that they also found this issue with the lag tester. They continue to use the Leo Bodnar and the Camera Method for the plasma reviews, if you go look at the Panasonic reviews in the last year, most are at 41ms and the camera method shows 23ms.
Interesting right? The end result of this is that plasmas cannot be compared to led/ldc timings from Leo Bodnar, they are just not apples to apples. Funny that Pioneer had a game mode etc and it actually made the lag worse, I am sure I read people in the past state that it felt like less lag, placebo effect??
Any thoughts or ideas? I went back to use my Pioneer Elite Kuro for gaming, its only 50 inches but the blur and uniformity destroys the leds I have. Ironically lag wise it feels the same as the fastest led I have ( 19ms) so that was a pleasant surprise.