If an interest in gaming is the primary reason you’re buying a new television, then do not go to the store and purchase anything new before reading this article. HAVPRO electronics installer Ryan Beaugureau is a licensed home entertainment system professional who shares his advice on how to find a good TV for gaming purposes.
For anyone who considers himself a gamer and enjoys spending hours each day playing video games, I would recommend checking out the LCD and LED televisions that are currently on the market.
LED and LCD televisions are generally considered better TVs for gaming enthusiasts because they are essentially computer monitors that have been turned into televisions, so they were created for just this type of stuff.
In general, I would recommend that people who play a lot of video games aim to get the fastest refreshing television that they can buy—something like the 120Hz or 240Hz televisions—because those are going to be able to keep up the fastest with consoles like the Sony Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360.
For serious gamers, television performance is really important. So having an LED or LCD television that can keep up with how fast the video gaming system is able to move is really key in reducing the lag time that the player sees on the screen, or ideally eliminating that lag time altogether.
One issue that used to come up for gamers buying flat screen TVs was the burning issue. With older TVs, there would sometimes be a burning on the screen that results when the same icon or image is displayed in the same spot for hours on end.
With the latest TV models, however, we are lucky in that we don’t have to worry about that too much anymore. Most flat screen TVs now will shut themselves off before they get into a situation where any burning of the screen is likely to occur.
Along the lines of burning, I install quite a few TVs at sports bars and it just so happens that one of the bars I service has an advertising widget on their television that creates a 10-inch black bar along the bottom and right side of the TV screen where paid ads can be placed. That bar is being placed on the same spot on the screen for hours on end each day, and even after four months, I still have not seen any burn in spots when we occasionally turn the advertising widget off. So that goes to show how little of a problem burning of the screens is these days, thanks to the improvements that the electronics companies have made with these machines.
Typically, the one place where I have found problems with burning issues is with the sports bars that have ESPN on constantly. There is one bar in particular where they sometimes broadcast the ESPN network on the non-HD channel, and when you do that, you will see that ESPN has a little logo on either side of the screen during the day.
With that particular situation, you can’t tell that the logo ESPN has on during its daytime programming has burned into the TV screen when it’s on any other channel necessarily. But when you turn the TV back to the non-HD ESPN network, then you can see some black lines that are sort of burned into the shape of the ESPN logo—and those logos don’t go away; they are constant.
But these scenarios are what happens when you are looking at a TV that has been on in a bar for 18 hours a day, seven days a week for two years or more. That much use is pretty extreme, even for a gamer who plays video games on his PS3 or Xbox for hours on end.
So it is only in rare cases where I would tell a video game player that he needs to be especially careful with burning when it comes to his new LCD or LED TV.
