Video playback has a lot more problems. This again goes back to the “flowing together” effect of CRT pixels. This allows video to look great on a CRT, and the lack of the effect makes video look pretty bad on an LCD. Even raw, uncompressed DVD images look like they’re 500MB avi copies. The 500MB avi copies of movies that look decent on CRTs look absolutly terrible. We had recently backed up our personal copy of Band Of Brothers and converted it to a high bitrate avi for convenience, and it looked perfect on our CRT. The LCD on the other hand seems to make every single inperfection in the encoding stand out. This situation with the video is quite possibly a carryover from how crisp the text was; the LCD is TOO detailed. It doesn’t smooth anything out so even the smallest imperfections in an image are brought to the forefront. But here’s the good news: We’ve messed around with quite a few LCDs in our lives, and we’ve never seen one reproduce video as good as the 940BF does. The quality problem is an inherent flaw in the design of LCDs in general, not the 940BF specifically. In fact, the 940BF does an admirable job of trying to counteract this problem. In the greater scheme of things, 'this ain’t no DLP screen', but it does a hell of a job trying. It’s basically the Rudy of the display world.


It’s time for us to talk about what you’re all interested in - games. The topic on everyone’s mind when we write about LCDs is ghosting. For those that don’t know, “ghosting” is a term used to describe an image “smearing” on an LCD screen when it moves too quickly. This is because pixels on the tail end of the movement can’t change fast enough to keep the object solid. It’s a very common and very noticeable problem on many lower-end LCDs on the market. Just recently we were at a DoD lan where one of the guys was forced to play on a flat panel with a 16ms response time, and it was pretty ugly. So does the 940BF ghost? Here’s the simple response: sorta but not really. The 940BF will only ghost in a very specific situation, and even then it will barely be noticeable. In almost any situation, you’d swear you were playing on a CRT. Every single movement is completely fluid, and you won’t notice a single ghost until you have a dark object move on a light-gray background. In this situation, the dark object, oddly enough, leaves a white ghost, a brighter color than the background it’s moving against. So basically, a grenade being thrown through the air on a map that’s overcast, like dod_donner, leaves a white contrail on it. This is not something to worry about though. The first reason is that this specific situation isn’t the most common thing in the world and it doesn’t directly affect any gaming situations. Secondly, it took us two weeks of playing on this thing to notice it. Once you know what to look for, it’s easy to see. However, it’s such a small problem compared to what we witnessed on that abysmal lan monitor that we can’t fault Samsung for it.