Motion Blur and Ghosting Test

How to use it

1. Pick Several speeds to compare blur at half, one and two times a speed, or Several backgrounds to see how your screen handles different shades.
2. Open full screen and follow one moving object with your eyes. Do not stare at a fixed spot: motion blur is what your eyes see while tracking.
3. Change the speed with the slider or the up and down arrows. Space pauses.

The line under the preview tells you how many pixels each object moves per frame at your frame rate. For a quick check, go to the refresh rate test first and make sure your screen runs at the rate you paid for.

What you are looking at

• Motion blur: the edges of the object look soft while it moves. Most LCD and OLED screens hold each frame until the next one, and your eyes keep moving, so the image smears. The blur is roughly the distance the object moves in one frame: at 960 pixels per second that is 16 px at 60 Hz and 6.7 px at 144 Hz.
• Ghosting: a darker or lighter copy trailing behind the object. It means the pixels change too slowly (slow response time).
• Overshoot (inverse ghosting): a bright or colored halo next to the edges. The screen pushes pixels too hard to speed them up, usually because overdrive is set too high.
• Stutter: the object jumps instead of gliding. Check that the frame ticker at the bottom lights every square in turn.

Ghosting often looks different on each background, which is why the backgrounds mode puts five shades side by side. Dark to mid gray transitions are the slowest on many panels.

How to reduce blur and ghosting

• Overdrive or response time setting. Most gaming monitors have one in the on screen menu. Try each level: pick the one with the least trailing and no bright halos.
• Run at the highest refresh rate. More frames per second means less movement per frame and less blur.
• Blur reduction or backlight strobing. Some monitors can flash the backlight once per frame, which makes motion much sharper at the cost of brightness. It usually only works at fixed refresh rates.
• TV picture modes. Game or PC mode turns off processing that can add delay; motion smoothing options change how motion looks and are a matter of taste.

Checking for skipped frames

The ticker at the bottom lights one square per frame. Take a photo of the screen with a slow shutter speed, for example 1/15 of a second, using a phone camera in manual or pro mode. You should see a solid run of lit squares next to each other. A gap in the run means a frame was skipped.