Topic: Wii would like to play on an HDTV?

one of the most important specifications to pay attention to is panel type. VA panels have the slowest reaction times and are heavily used by sony and samsung, making most of their tvs laggy even when they're displaying a signal in their native resolution. IPS panels are used in most panasonic and sharp tvs, as well as the newer LGs. an IPS type panel will usually be pretty fast and is the way to go if you want a gaming hdtv. look around enough and you can usually dig up what type of panel a tv has.

I Actually have seen Cables at my work from Monster Games. You plug them into your wii then your TV, and it gives you like a somewhat HD experience when your playing your Wii. They look and sound really cool but a $30 price tag kinda makes me wonder

I have a 42 inch, plasma screen, and whenever I play video games, sometimes the things on the screen get blurry....don't even know why...

I use a 26" Sony Bravia, and get a great picture. Sometimes I adjust the brightness and the screens color a little from normal to vivid color to make it really show off its magnificents.

Most of the lag in TVs comes from scaling and processing not displaying. Panel type is important but it isn't as important as you make it out to be. I have a Samsung and it has served me well AND the Samsung panels consistently look better in the shops, particularly the LED backlit displays. From personal experience alone I'd buy a Samsung over a Panasonic.

Exactly. I've got a 40" Bravia. At first I did notice some input lag, but after switching from 480i to 480p and realising our new TV had a "game" mode (I think it gets rid of most of the image processing)... it's pretty much perfect! So yeah, I was a little worried at first. But it turned out fine. I don't think you'd be likely to have any real problems with input lag from any decent brand (assuming you set it up right).

But how are the jaggies on all of your tv's (Wii Games)?

the majority does come from processing, but it still doesn't help when your tv starts with some lag before even getting to processing. all tv's are going to spend some time scaling and deinterlacing the image, the point is that if you get a fast panel like an IPS then even with that processing you shouldn't go over 40ms of delay, unless it's a higher end one with the fancy motion processing. VA panel tvs can often take that long just displaying something in their native resolution with game mode on; some samsungs are known to get well over 100ms of delay when scaling is involved. even if you have slow reflexes, that should be an obvious amount of lag.

i've been researching this because i'm about to buy an hdtv for gaming, and everything i've seen suggests that the tvs that have faster panels also tend to have faster scaling. for instance, i saw a comparison between an IPS panel LG and a VA panel samsung that both had around 30ms of lag to start with- the samsung took 35ms extra to upscale something from 720p to 1080p while the LG only took 4ms. upscaling from 480i probably would have made the contrast in speed between the two much much worse.

the point is that if you want a quick tv and don't want to research every individual tv's lag time, the best place to start is the panel. it becomes much easier to sort out the other stuff from there

Also recommended for everyone is to get some kind of DVD Video Essentials disc to help you calibrate your TV properly. This makes a massive difference as most TVs have factory settings for sharpness switched on which creates the illusion of a sharper picture, but is actually adding noise to the signal and really should be all but switched off in favour of tweaking your contrast, brightness and colour levels.

Oh that's a nice suggestion Sean. I might try that one out.