Don’t fall for marketing jargon
Monitor specs can often be very misleading, regardless of the panel type you’re looking at. It’s easy to assume that a monitor with impressive numbers on the box will automatically deliver a great experience, but that’s not really the case most of the time. A lot of these specs only reflect ideal conditions that you rarely ever encounter once you start gaming, working, or web browsing. Manufacturers highlight the most flattering numbers possible because they know most buyers won’t dig deeper to understand what those numbers truly represent.
After using multiple TN, IPS, and OLED monitors over the past decade and a half, I’ve come to terms with the fact that monitor spec sheets only tell a fraction of the story. Some of the best monitors I’ve owned didn’t look all that impressive on paper, whereas others that claimed the highest refresh rates or lowest response times left me disappointed the moment I started gaming on them. One thing I know for sure is that the more monitors you try, the easier it becomes to see through the marketing and focus on the details that actually improve your experience.
Response times
Claimed response time numbers rarely reflect real-world motion clarity
You’ve probably seen many LCD gaming monitors advertised with 1ms response times, but that number almost never tells you how the panel actually behaves. That’s because manufacturers measure the fastest pixel transition they can find under ideal conditions, and not the full range of transitions you experience while gaming. In reality, the slower pixel transitions are the ones that influence motion clarity the most, and when they take longer than expected, you end up seeing ghosting, smearing, or inverse ghosting, even if the spec sheet claims a 1ms response time.
The thing is, most LCD monitors don’t deliver anywhere near the advertised response times out of the box.
