Review of Samsung LN-R329D: a LCD TV 8ms for Gaming

Alright here it is.... first of all, let me just say that I upgraded from a Sony 24" gdwmf900... in fact it sits right next to me right now. The sony is an excellent monitor and nearly flawless except for... I wish it was bigger... hence the need to go to 32"... and now on with the review...


The Samsung LN-R329D is a beautiful monitor... samsung did an excellent job designing this monitor and it shows. It looks great sitting on my desk...
The colors and visual display are phenomenal for a 32" display... all the text is clear and easily legible. Unfortunately that's where it ends...

Gaming on this LCD TV is subpar... its filled with issues from mild ghosting to resolution limitations. What a 32" display does is fully emphasize the true limitations of an LCD! Even though this may be a 8ms monitor... mild ghosting is still present. This is further degraded by the piss poor 60hz refresh rate... 60hz makes for poor response in quick games... belive me, i've been gaming at a refresh rate of 100hz on a crt for years... i'm not just talking about flickering... I'm talking about over all response of the graphics. There is no flickering on the LCD... its just that the 60hz refresh rate is too slow for high speed games like Counterstirke. Any attempt at changing the resoltion to something non native is a mistake and results in a big degradation in quality.... on the plus side you could eek out a 75hz refresh rate at the non native 1076x768... but it wasn't worth it. It was wrought with tearing and fuzzy graphics. In addition, what doesnt make any sense to me is all this push for faster response rates for lcd pixels to change and yet no push to increase the refresh rate at the same time... think about it... althought your pixel may be a blazing 4ms fast and be equivalent to 125+ frames per second... your refresh rate is still locked at 60 ro 75hz... which means that the monitor only requests 60 frames per second. So despite what your graphics card may push out, despite the respone rate of your lcd monitor, you're still cappped at a refresh rate of 60 NEW framers per second... I'm sorry that is just unacceptble... Believe me i wanted to think differently,, but after doing a test on this LCD monitor... I've been disappointed.
Some of you LCD diehards may be crying out, "turn on the vsync and tripple buffer" Well, vsync was tried on and off... i really didn't notice a difference primarily since my x800 pro pretty much handled everything i was playing. The tripple buffer sucks... it lags the mouse or screen... i'd whip the mouse around and the screen would have a noticeable (10ms or greater) lag behind the crosshair... that's unacceptable... it felt like i was drunk...

LCDs are definitely NOT ready for fast pace games... especially if you've been playing with a high quality CRT. The quickness isn't there and the increased real estate just isn't worth it... all the larger screeen does is emphasize the lackluster performance.

I have no doubt this LCD is great for movies and such... but for FPS games, its a two thumbs down. I'm going to pack this huge mother back in its box, get a RMA number, and ship it back. My 24" Sony is here to stay... until SED or OLED provide something that is comparable.

You pretty much described the experiance I had comparing my Sony G520P 21" CRT vs. 2001FP LCD side by side. When I first saw the Desktop load on the 2001FP the "Wow" factor was definately there, display was crisp & vibrant ..but when I started comparing Games thats when the LCD's various weaknesses came out to the point I sent it back to Dell , I have a used 24" FW900 Widescreen CRT on the way hopefully its in good shape

I'm picking this puppy up, the sony. I'm going to hold onto my Dell until then but yeah I could do without the tiny amount of blur and go for the faster refresh.

Quake is coming, after all.

I certainly agree, for most computer uses this would be an excellent monitor as long as you stick with native refresh rate. This monitor is even good for many games, just NOT First Person Shooter games. In actuality, i doubt any LCD will be comparable to CRT quality... simply b/c the refresh rate is hanging around 60hz. 60hz is equivalent to 60 frames per second. Refresh means that the monitor only looks for updates 60 times a second. Keeping that in mind, let's move to response rate. Response rate is the time for a LCD pixel to change from grey to grey or black to white. In other words, for an 8ms LCD monitor, the fastest the dot can change will be 8ms or longer.... Taking the resopnse rate we can then figure out the max number times a pixel can be changed in one second... (example. 1 second / .012 seconds = 83... 83 being the max number of times the pixel can change in 1 second... which we can conclude that with a 12ms response time the pixel can have a maximum of 83 frames per second. A 8ms response time will allow a maximum of 125 frames per second (1/.008=125).

Ok, sure it sounds great that these LCDs have such fast response times, however... while the LCD companies pull this magic trick, they neglect to incrase the refresh rate... they leave it at 60 hz ro 75hz. Uh oh! That means no matter how fast the response rate, you're never going to see above 60 or 75 frames per second.

Some of you may say... the human eye can't see that fast... that's bs... you get a 4 ms LCD monitor with a 60 or 75 hz refresh rate and compare it to a CRT monitor updating at 100hz... and you'll see a difference. I use a sony trinitron 24" monitor... belive me... when i play counterstrike, no matter how fast i spin around, it looks crystal clear... why? b/c the monitor is asking for 100 framers in one second. The human eye can see 60 frames per second... so long as the frames are instantaneous... however when it comes to LCD, since the action is only updating at 60 frames per second... you're gonna be missing 40 frames that the crt users are getting.

Actually some of the transitions on a 2405FPW take up to 20+ms. I think 1920*1200 @ 60Hz also is near the top end of the DVI connections abilities(bandwidth) correct me if I'm wrong. This things picture is truly beautiful but I at the prices of these PW900's I might sell my Dell. I'll miss the 2405 and that 1.5".

I don't believe its the dvi connections limitations... its simply the manufacturer's giving a lcd's a refresh rate of 60hz... I've used the dvi port to connect my CRT monitor using an adapter... and i got my usual 100hz. Plus, dvi will support 75hz lcd refresh rates as well... so the limitation is in the monitor... my guess is that its cheaper to go with lower refresh rates... I'm not sure. All i know is the equation is not balanced... to get optimal performance, you need the refresh rate to match the equivalent response rate... if either one is lacking... you're going to see the weakest link. So manufacturers should idealy have a refresh rate of 85hz or higher plus a mean response rate of at most 12 ms (which corresponsds to 83.3333 frames/second) or lower (a 100hz coupled with 8ms mean response time would be my ideal). Until then... just improving the response rate will have little effect.

It is a DVI limitation

DVI does not have enough bandwith to handle 1920x1200 at 100hz, as a matter of fact it can barely handle it at 60hz.

And using DVI for CRT is not digital, its pretty much plain VGA.

i agree... dvi limitaion on the monitor side... not the graphics card side. But again, remember the samsung has d-sub input only with no dvi... and its still refreshing at 60-75hz... and we still are faced with the LCD limitation... make us some LCDs that refresh at 100hz and have 8 ms response times please!!