DaveBaumann said:
So, is a 25ms response time really not good for playing games?
That my friend, is a very loaded question, and the answer is that it really depends. I would actually suggest doing a search on this forum for LCD, and you'll probably come up with some discussion of this topic. I guess I'll repeat some of it though since it's christmas.
Basically, there is no specific ways manufacturers are required to list their pixel response times for the LCDs they produce. Most manufacturers these days though, have adopted a method where they measure the time it takes to go from white to black, and back to white, or black to white and back to black. Usually a number like "25ms" is the sum of these two numbers. You also must keep in mind that they usually have some kind of threshold they use to claim that it has finished a transition. Some manufacturers play games with this. So one manufacturer may claim that once a LCD element is within 10% of it's target voltage it has successfully completed a transition, others may decide that 15% is a valid threshold.
There is another problem. Generally going from white to black, or from black to white is a very easy transition. You can either min or max the voltage and you very quickly will get to the target voltage. Stablizing on intermediate voltages though is much slower because extra time is needed to slow down and stablize on a specific voltage (within whatever tolerance the manufacturer specifies). In this case, everything depends on how quickly the electronics in the display can stablize on intermediate voltages, and the pixel response time published by manufacturers doesn't tell you this at all because their tests don't measure it, they just measure how quickly the min and max voltages can be reached!
So basically, a display with a published 16ms response time will be able to complete both a white to black and black to white transition in 16ms (though again, to within whatever tolerance the manufacturer uses) but will usually be much slower for certain color transitions. because publishers don't tell you about the other color transitions, you really have no idea if a display with a 16ms response time is actually any faster than a display with a published 25ms response time for anything but black to white or white to black.
There is an article over at extremetech which is pretty old now that talks about a technology mitsubishi is working on that is designed to make intermediate color transitions faster. It's pretty interesting, but the thing that is really interesting is that they have a chart showing gray level transitions to and from values ranging from 0 to 255. In it, you can see that going from white to black only takes 8ms, and going from black to white only takes 17, (so they measure it as a 25ms display), but most transitions are actually taking closer to 40ms, and one over 50ms!
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,10085,00.asp
Honestly, if I was in the market for and LCD, I would rely more based on word of mouth and high speed photographs of games in motion on the display than the published pixel response. You might want to try reading through this thread at arstechnica (warning, it's 214 pages long):
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=4190936913