Exclusive: Samsung cancels its 1 ms LCD, and changes the rules

Samsung hid the identity of the screens on show

One surprise from Berlin's IFA came during a meeting with two representatives from Korean manufacturer Samsung, who told us that their screen with a 1 ms response time won't be launched before the end of the year as had previously been announced. 

In fact, they do not foresee the product ever receiving an official launch, because they no longer intend to use response times as a measurement of the quality of their monitors.

This change has been brought about by the arrival of a new generation of 120 Hz monitors, whose reactivity scores are likely to be even more difficult to interpret than those we already have.*  A simple example is enough to illustrate the problem: what's faster today, a 5 ms screen at 120 Hz or a 2 ms screen at 60 Hz?

Having seen them side by side, the 5 ms, 120 Hz model certainly takes the upper hand.  But given that the official standard for measuring response time was never that great, should we really set so much store behind these readings?  We've already criticized it a number of times …

Samsung kills its own 2 ms screen

The two representatives we spoke to went on to confirm that, as soon as a screen reaches 120 Hz, afterglow is no longer a problem.  Our opinion is that we'd very much like to test this with our own software, but they're mostly probably right.

In our experience, an up-to-date 5 ms model will only really irritate around 10% of users.  And that 10%, mostly made up of gamers, will most likely say, 'well, it's a bit fuzzy in part x of game y' before forgetting about it and getting absorbed in the moment.

To show how they felt about measuring response times, or the idea of having a standard measurement at all, during our first meeting with Samsung, they showed us two different monitors.  The first, on the left, was the SyncMaster 2253BW, a TN panel running at 60 Hz with a response time of 2 ms.  To the right, meanshile, was the new SyncMaster 2243, another TN panel, this time at 120 Hz whose response time is 5 ms, which certainly had a much better image quality.



But here's what the public saw:



So what magic was needed to transform both of these screens and invert their capabilities?  We can't get hold of the spell, unfortunately, and we're not sure we care anyway.  By all accounts, the ISO standard, despite all its faults, is no longer in play for Samsung.

At the end of the day, the most interesting thing is that Samsung seems happy to wave a magic wand and adjust the ratings of its most powerful monitors without even flinching …


* It's already the case that a 2 ms TN panel is not necessarily any faster than a 6 ms PVA panel, or a well-adjusted 8 ms MVA.  It's a very unusual measure, response time, because it was badly defined when it was first standardized for screens much smaller than today's models.