Beware of specifications in all things; don’t get caught up in the details and try to look at the whole performance of anything before you buy.  Using your ears and eyes in a hands on test of any new product is the ONLY way to properly gauge performance.  This is always true in speakers, receivers, amps and display devices. 

The latest spec to be made into a marketing tool is the LCD panel’s spec called “rise and fall” a spec that is supposed to quantify pixel response time.  Faster pixel response times makes images move cleanly across the screen, this is particularly important for video gaming, scrolling and fast moving images.  But the specification that is supposed to measure this is misunderstood not only by consumers but by the manufacturers themselves.

The true rise and fall spec is supposed to measure the time it takes a pixel in an LCD panel to rise go from black to white and then fall go from white to black again.  A complete rise/fall cycle can occur in a just a handful of milliseconds.  Confusion is introduced by the lack of a true industry standard for this measure.  So you end up with some manufacturers using another pixel response measurement called grey-to-grey response time.  That’s the response time it takes for a pixel to go from one shade of grey to another, the numbers are obviously much more impressive on a spec sheet.  The trouble with grey-to-grey response times is there is no measure of exactly which shades of grey are being used, there is no standard.  Grey-to-grey response times are just a marketing gimmick to publish better numbers on a spec sheet.  It’s confusing to customers and even confusing to manufacturers (like the Samsung example here) who published one spec in an ad, then the spec sheet for the product posted the true rise and fall specification, the numbers on the spec sheet contradicted the ad for the same product.

VESA (the Video Electronics Standards Association) will addressed the problem and publish a technical definition for rise-and-fall pixel response time soon.  Expect VESA to clear this one up by mid 2006.