Anchored by excellent black level and 1:1 pixel mapping from "Just Scan", colours and fine detail in Gran Turismo 5: Prologue simply "popped" on the Samsung LE40A656 HDTV, contributing heavily to a visually immersive gaming experience. [100Hz Motion Plus] reduced motion blurring, but also introduced some mild interpolation artefacts like intermittent tearing and shimmer around moving objects, although to be fair these were a lot more subtle than what we observed on the F86.
Here's the not-so-good news: even with [100Hz Motion Plus] disabled, we measured input lag on the LE40A656 to be 30ms slower than our resident Samsung F96, which means that it's up to 60ms slower than the Sony W4000. While most people will not be affected by this, sensitive gamers will probably experience this input lag in games demanding sharp reflexes. We certainly did: in Call Of Duty 4 somehow we were unable to nail as many headshots on the Samsung LE40A656, though we readily concede that the reason might very well have been psychological.
There are two ways to mitigate input lag (to the level where it's on par with the Samsung F96) on the LE40A656, neither of which is satisfactory. The first is to set [Entertainment Mode] to "Game", but the resultant image would be too bright and over-sharpened (which cannot be fixed because the picture settings are locked).
The other (slightly better) method is to use the VGA port which seems to be clear of most of Samsung LE40A656's processing, and can accept and display 1920x1080 progressive video signals. However, not every gaming console has a VGA output (think Sony PS3). Also, some key picture adjustment controls such as [Sharpness], [Colour] and [100Hz Motion Plus] are greyed-out and unavailable in PC/ VGA mode.
Best of all, the interpolation artefacts that come with [100Hz Motion Plus] have been attenuated to a level where they're tolerable for day-to-day viewing on the Samsung LE40A656, though we still wouldn't engage it for film-based content, as it makes movies look like videos even on the "Low" setting. Once we've come to accept that no 100Hz MCFI (motion-compensated frame interpolation) technology can be perfect (for the foreseeable future at least) due to the very nature of what it's trying to do (i.e. create frames that aren't there in the first place), the increase in motion resolution can be pretty appealing when [100Hz Motion Plus] is applied to the appropriate material such as sports and video games.
(nelle discussioni su Sky HD pero' non ho mai letto di questo quindi temo che il nostro Sammy ci metta del suo)
