Samsung News Geek

Even using the title LCD vs. LED is somewhat confusing because LED monitors are LCD or "liquid crystal displays". Liquid crystal display monitors are a thin screen technology that don't naturally have light and use either LED "light emitting diode" technology or CCFL "cold-cathode fluorescent lamps" in order to produce the light from the back of the screen that you see. Depending on the quality of your display you might see what's generally referred to as backlight bleeding on your monitor which can make your picture seem a little cloudy in certain areas and most often from the corners. A small amount of this is considered to be normal on most LCD monitors.

LED backlighting is the more recent technology and allows for thinner displays which use less energy, don't emit mercury, and can have higher contrast ratios when compared to CCFL LCD computer monitors. LED monitors achieve higher contrast by dimming or completely turning off the LED lights.

If there's one advantage that CCFL LCD monitors tend to have over LED monitors it's that they seem to have a slight advantage in input lag over LED monitors at a lower cost. One logical, although unproven explanation for this could have to do with LED monitors using cheaper panels to stay on par with CCFL monitor prices.

Response time should be measured as the time it takes for a pixel to go from black to white and then back again. This time is measured in milliseconds (ms) and can be as low as 1ms. Monitors with slow response times can't keep up with the information they receive from the graphics card and often have issues with ghosting or blurring. There is some confusion on official response times as most manufacturers measure the fastest gray-to-gray response time of their monitor vs. an average of an entire cycle in order to post lower numbers that lure in consumers. Despite what some may say a monitor with a GTG (gray-to-gray) response time of under 5ms is still very good while gaming.

Input Lag

A lot has been said about input lag in the last few years. Input lag is the difference in the time it takes for a signal to be input into the display versus when it is actually displayed. Older CRT monitors generally have no input lag and are used as a standard when measuring this value against LCD displays which generally have some level of input lag. Display lag for most modern LCDs are generally at the low end of this spectrum but times for LCD displays have been measured as low as 10ms and as high as 68ms. Whether this number matters to you has a lot to do with the types of games you play. If you play MMORPG games, for example, then this value is not that important. If, however, you play first person shooter games, then your input lag and your response times added together can make a significant difference when coming face to face with an opponent. As most manufacturers don't readily give out information on the input lag of their monitors you may need to search in order to find information concerning it or test for it yourself. If you can't find this number, then remember that most modern LED gaming monitors are made with low input lag in mind so if you find one that has a low response time, then most likely it's on the low end of the spectrum for input lag. Anything under 1 frame on average is usually considered adequate. It's also important to remember that most of your competitors play with the same disadvantage (unless they use a CRT monitor which is highly unlikely these days). There's a lot more information that I won't discuss in this post on input lag and for more information I highly recommend this forum thread on monitors with sub 1 frame input lag.