This "120hz" 1080p TV from 2011 shows two very different sides of itself - as both the slowest TV I've ever reviewed and also one of the fastest, it highlights just how important empirical testing can be to getting good outcomes.
Overview/Image quality
At native resolution (1080p) this TV is pixel perfect: no aliasing, no cropping. This really should be the standard rather than the exception. 480i/p has 20 pixels cropped off each edge, and is slightly aliased, but the effect is mild. At 720p the TV re-arranges the pixels producing very mild jagged edges, but has no aliasing, see photo. This is common among 1080p TVs.
There are zoom/stretch options to crop more, and/or stretch 480p to fit the screen width, by why would you want that?
It advertises itself as supporting 120hz, but this is really a motion smoothing option, and the TV can't accept a 120hz input signal - the fastest it can sync to is 60 hz. It will accept up to 75hz at some sub-1080p resolutions, but doesn't redraw the screen any faster in these modes, resulting in drift/drop frames. But as we will see there is some truth to the 120hz designation, unlike many TVs.
It has all the standard inputs, including 3 HDMI, VGA, and 1 yPbPr, all of which I tested. Picture quality is identical across all inputs, but as you will see the temporal properties vary wildly.
Input Lag
This display has a game mode. But all this changes is color/sharpening presets, and has no impact on lag. What does impact lag is turning on "smooth motion" (any value other than off is the same), which toggles the 120hz mode. While I can't tell that the motion is actually any smoother in "smooth motion mode" it does reduce lag, presumably because of the higher refresh rate, so I used it for all my testing. No other video quality settings changed lag, though I turned them all off just to be safe.
I used a piLagTesterPRO to measure input lag. This device sends a frame of video over HDMI and measures how long it takes to display it. Complicating things significantly, this TV is yet another display that does not actually sync to the input signal - instead it fills its own internal frame buffer from the video input and then draws that with a fixed additional delay of up to 8ms, randomly determined each time you turn on the set or switch inputs. At least it can actually sync to 60hz or 59.94hz so whatever lag you get when you turn on your console will be constant for that session, with no dropped frames. It can also draw at 24hz which is particularly nice for watching movies.
Because lag varies each time it is turned on, I've elected to report the average lag values here, since that seems fairest, but there's no right answer; for more discussion of this issue see the above link.
Input Lag Test Results
I report two kinds of values.
1st response measures how long it takes for the TV to start responding (I use a 5% change in display brightness). This overly optimistic value doesn't tell how long it takes to see anything useful, but matches what other reviewers call
input lag.
full response is a more realistic measure of lag, and requires the display to reach 80% of full brightness. This combines both
input lag and
response time, and is closer to what you would actually experience in a game.
HDMI results
I first tested with HDMI and was very disappointed with this display:
| top | bottom | | |
| Resolution | 1st response | full response | 1st response | full response | scan out | response time |
| 480i | 111.0 | 120.0 | 119.0 | 128.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 |
| 480p | 78.0 | 87.0 | 86.0 | 95.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 |
| 720p | 78.0 | 87.0 | 86.0 | 95.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 |
| 1080p | 69.0 | 78.0 | 77.0 | 86.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 |
At every resolution this TV was among the slowest I had ever tested. 480i was very slow at 111ms, but even at native resolution the 1st response was at 69ms, and full response took another 9ms. At least the scan out was very fast, at 8ms, fully twice the standard 16ms you see for 60hz content normally. This is the sense with which the TV really does 120hz.
I tested a new other resolutions not in this chart, and when I got to a computer resolution (800x600) I got a totally unexpected result with the 1st response dropping to 22ms! I also tried using a DVI 1920x1080 mode over HDMI (DMT #82, for the curious), but that was still as slow as standard 1080p. But this gave me the idea to test the VGA port on the back of the screen, and the results were astoundingly better.
VGA results
| top | bottom | | | |
| Resolution | 1st response | full response | 1st response | full response | scan out | response time | rf full |
| 480i | | | | | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| 480p | 22.0 | 31.0 | 30.0 | 39.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 |
| 720p | 22.0 | 31.0 | 30.0 | 39.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 |
| 1080p | 22.0 | 31.0 | 30.0 | 39.0 | 8.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 |
The Pi doesn't output VGA directly, but I have a $2 HDMI→VGA adapter ($2 including shipping from China, no less) that I have been measured to add less than 1ms of lag. Probably closer to 0ms but it's hard to know for absolutely sure.
Now the TV responded the same for every video mode that was supported. Unfortunately, it still didn't properly sync to the input sync signal, meaning that lag numbers randomly varied by 8ms each time the TV/input device was turned on (as above, and as above, I'm reporting average values). The TV didn't accept 480i over VGA. I'm not sure if that's a limit of the TV or the adapter I was using.
The change in performance is huge relative to HDMI. VGA is 47ms faster than native resolution over HDMI. And 720p/480p were just as fast as 1080p, unlike with HDMI. If only there was a way to tell the screen to treat all HDMI inputs as coming from a computer, and skip the noisy digital → analogue → digital conversion.
Component (yPrPb) results
Unfortunately Component was just as slow as HDMI.
OSSC results
I was curious if another HDMI source would get the slow side of this TV or the fast side. So I tried using an OSSC. Unfortunately, with both 720p and 480p, the 1st response on the OSSC averaged 78ms, just like with the pi. So you'd have to connect your OSSC or other console over VGA.
PS5 results
Joking, I don't have a Play Station 5. But I see no evidence that it would be any better than the Pi or the OSSC over HDMI. The only way to get good lag out of this TV is to use the VGA input.
Response time
I measured the responses time for black to white, but also various levels of gray to gray. The timing only varied 8 to 12ms, with 9ms being the most common, which is very good. I've seen displays that are 2-3 times slower when measured using dark gray to light gray transitions (smaller transitions can be slower than full black to full white depending on the display tech).
Results compared to other displays
To allow quick comparison between many displays I've summarized the results across all the displays I've personally tested with the piLagTester Pro. Min lag is the first response at the top of the screen, in the display's fastest mode; real lag is the full response at the bottom. Numbers in red denote average values that can vary by up to 8ms between power cycles.
This list is sorted by the 720p "real lag", since every display supports 720p. This TV gets two separate entries, and as you can see it really needs them: on HDMI it's the slowest TV I've ever tested at 720p. Meanwhile compared to the VGA results, the only other TV that was faster was a fancy Panasonic plasma TV. There is another Vizio TV that would have beat it, had I sorted by 1080p, which is the
Vizio VO370M from the same era. That TV only has good performance at 1080p, but I'm thinking I need to retest it over VGA and see if it can also be coaxed to be fast at other resolutions too.
Note that sorting by real lag really helps this TV because it has the 8ms scan out. If you just looked at min lag this TV would still be in the upper part of the graph, but it would lose a good bit of it's advantage.
Nonetheless the bragging rights for fastest TVs is somewhat overshadowed by the fact that the computer monitors on this list are all much faster than the TVs. If you can stand the limited inputs and smaller size, a computer monitor is almost certainly a better choice than a TV.
Conclusion
This is a great TV for modern gamers if you don't mind using a VGA adapter and only having one input (vga switches are not horribly expensive, though). If you wanted to retro game, you'd also probably need an OSSC since there's no other way to get fast 480i performance that I could find.
It's perfectly usable without a remote, as well.
Other models
I only tested input lag on the E470VL, but I would expect that the E421VL and E551VL would perform the same, based on similarity of the model numbers. And on the fact that the E470VL manual also covers those two models, and that manual shows the specs to be basically the same other than pixel size.
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