If you want to skip everything, just look at the last 2 image links!

Now that I have a range of TVs from the same manufacturer I did some measurements of output lag (using a similar idea to http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess... ) and comparisons of image quality.  The numbers should be for relative comparison instead of absolute measurements.  Anything that is +/-2ms should be considered equal.  I need to film a high speed clock using the high speed camera for calibration.  Overall it is what I expected with a few surprises! 

The images are not edited to look better/worse, or even staged at all.  Most TVs were on the floor and I didn't bother setting the input options except game modes.  Colors will change with viewing angle, TV settings, background lighting, image compression, and quantity of hamsters.  The "nestopia" pictures show the output from my laptop at the native panel resolution to get a baseline.

In the end the absolute worst AVS delay is better than the best NES delay.  Analog loses badly in every case.  If you don't notice lag with your NES then you certainly won't with the AVS.  The image quality is awesome all around, and anything wrong is only visible when you are ridiculously close.  On the 5000 series the 720p AVS and 1080p Nestopia both have the same sampling artifacts so I see no significant difference in running non native.  

Samsung 4000 series 30" 720p
This is my oldest TV, from Jan 2013.  I have been using it as a computer monitor since then.  It is listed in displaylag.com as 26ms.  The horrid composite handling is typical of all the TVs, where pixels become jaggy blurs.  There were also obvious jailbars.  It is a native 760 pixel panel so it doesn't match 720p or the common 1366x768.  The upscaling is pretty good with some gradients between white and other colors.  Once you get more than about 3' away they are too small to be seen.  
Ideal CRT - 13ms
Composite NES - 52ms (2.4 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
HDMI AVS - 31ms (1.1 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
Nestopia - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict

Samsung 5000 series 40" 1080p
I got this one for expos so it was at PRGE last year.  This winter it was used as my RacerMate display.  It is a native 1080 pixel panel with 33ms at displaylag.com.  Again composite NES looks terrible and is far slower than the AVS, but it is measurably faster than the 4000 series.  The upscaling has more gradients, like its trying to do 3d shading.  When you are within a few feet you can see some dark areas in the corner of diagonal white pixels.  This effect is also covered below....
Ideal CRT - 13ms
Composite NES - 44ms (1.9 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
HDMI AVS - 33ms (1.3 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
Nestopia - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict

Samsung 6000 series 40" 4k 2160p
The newest one!  My first 4k TV was initially the worst.  On the same day, it happend to cost me as much my daughters knocked out tooth in a face plant on scooter.  There is extreme blurring on the composite input, but there is also what looks like image compression artifacts inside areas of color.  In the SMB zoom pict you can see the blue lines/dots inside the white 1985 letters.  The analog inputs have little adapter cables, and if the component one is even plugged in then the composite input is ignored.  That took me a long time to figure out!  The HDMI input has the same dark areas at diagonals that the 5000 series has.  It is also inserting color again, this time look at the top row of pixels for 1985 for the white horizontal lines.  A few feet away and those are too small to be visible, but very annoying once you know they are there.  Both the HDMI and composite input were so amazingly slow that I did the measurements twice.  Fortunately I missed a setting, see the next section!
Ideal CRT - 13ms
Composite NES - 129ms (7.0 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
HDMI AVS - 127ms (6.9 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
Nestopia - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict

Samsung 6000 series 40" 4k 2160p - PC MODE
The secret to success was setting the HDMI port to PC.  Suddenly the image quality is amazing and the speed is back.  As expected, 4k looks the best.  Similar to my old Aquos the PC/game mode cuts off a massive amount of time.  Composite game mode cuts off ~4.5 frames of lag, but it looks even worse!  There are significant vertical bars, ringing around every color change, and the horizontal smearing is much longer.  
Ideal CRT - 13ms
Composite NES - 55ms (2.5 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
HDMI AVS - 41ms (1.7 frames behind CRT) - full screen pict - SMB zoom pict
 

Wow, that initial 4k score was bad!

Bunnyboy, do you have any 1080p native PC monitors to test? I use a 23" 1080p ASUS monitor, listed as 9ms on displaylag.com. I question this statistic though as it is less than one frame. Currently I reroute audio to my stereo using a Monoprice HDMI switch. There is no detectable lag on my Wii-U or PS3 with this display so I should be good with the AVS.

Also my 2006 Sanyo in the living room has slight lag using composite or Svideo, enough to make SHMUPs a bit sloppy. It is a 1366x768 native 720p/1080i display with built in overscan. Somehow the overscan disables when I hook my laptop up though.

You're the guy that made the AVS. It looks really great. I hope you sell alot and made alot so scalpers don't make this hard to get for a decent price.

Had you turned off overscan simulation on all of these?

Pretty sure "PC mode" already disables overscan simulation, but most TVs make it a bit more difficult to find/disable the option.

I think some Samsung TVs call it "Just Scan?"

My Sony calls it "Full Pixel."

Looks like some Samsung TVs automatically disable overscan simulation when you label the input "PC/DVI."

My Hannspree "28-inch" TVs are used as computer monitors. They actually have 27.5-inch 1920x1200 16:10 panels, same as my Hanns-G 28-inch monitor.

The "TVs" stretch all 16:9 content vertically to fill the 16:10 screen. Most people prefer stretching rather than having black bars, but it's annoying as hell to me. I'd rather preserve the correct shape. With a Windows Media Center PC outputting 1920x1200, all was great. The aspect ratio means 4:3 stuff looks a lot larger than it would on a 16:9 TV.

Since my Hi-Def NES doesn't support 1920x1200 output, there's a lot of unwanted resizing. I really wish all these HDMI devices supported 1920x1200 resolution.

This is awesome news that 4K isn't an issue with the AVS! Right now all I have is a lowly UN60ES8000 Samsung (2012 flagship model), but I'm looking to get a 4K set in the near future.

I never thought of it, but I planned on putting an AVS in my Nintendo room where I have a 34" Sony trintron xbr widescreen flatscreen CRT yada yada with 1080i. This is cited as the best tube Sony made, but not sure if it's also 720p. I assumed it would, maybe I need to test it out though.

I hope your CRT has hdmi ports then.

HDMI to RCA converters exist.
 

CRT's with HDMI ports also exist.

Is it actually widescreen?  HDMI CRTs I have heard about weren't, but they did lots of weird stuff during the transition.
 

I have a Sony XBR CRT with DVI that's wide screen.

Yeah, that's the XBR910. The XBR960 added HDMI, CableCARD, and adapter-less MS Pro Duo support, but it was still a widescreen CRT. The HD Samsung CRT we had in 2003 was also widescreen. The later XBR970 had a Taiwanese-made tube instead of the incredible "best image/picture quality of any TV ever" Sony SFP Trinitron WEGA tube, but it was also widescreen HD with HDMI on a CRT.

It has an image processor with no way to bypass it except some odd PAL resolution (576p IIRC), but it really does look amazing. Even Sony's Cinema mode that did inverse pull-down on telecined video to restore full resolution would scale the progressive frame up and send 1080i to the tube. I wonder if the XS955 or whatever it was called took advantage of a CRT's ability to have multiple resolutions (no native resolution). My understanding is that it was the same SFP tube but without the extra XBR image processor and such.

I think the xbr960 is the one I have, has those features, I'll have to check though. I posted in in the finders keepers non gaming thread a while back.

I've seen concerns expressed for 1080 and 4k upscaling from the 720p signal because most televisions are said to have blurry/smooth upscalers.. These pics appear to look great though.

Any blurriness in the 4K image that you could tell?

I came very close to buying a widescreen 32" CRT w/ component inputs for my Wii in early 2007. Ultimately I saved and got a flat panel Sanyo. Kinda wish in hindsight I'd gotten the tube though.

I would probably just buy another benq gaming monitor before a TV, but then you're limited in screen size. TVs have horrible pixel response times, 15 to 20ms  

Why don't they make low latency PC monitors >30" ?

Seems like there would be a market for these... 

I used to have a 30" Sony KV-30HS420 Widescreen CRT with HDMI and component inputs. Had to get rid of it with the tiny living space I have, but I regret it til this day. The only downside was it weighed a ton and had a deep deep footprint. Beautiful picture, be it HDMI stuff or S-Video/Component/Composite. Blu-rays and PS3/360 looked great over HDMI too. Same one as in this video:

I haven't seen the doom and gloom upscaling on any of my 1080p panels (Samsung, Sharp, Hannspree, Sony).  Only the Sharp was bought for quality instead of price, and it is by far the laggiest.  You can compare the 1080p Nestopia vs the AVS on the 5000 series and see similar scaling artifacts which I personally consider minor.  If I missed game/pc mode on that one then I would expect a bump in quality for both.  
  Nope it looks the best.  On some of the others (including running at native resolution) you see some shading around the borders between significantly different colors, and there is none of that on the 4k.  Again I have to make sure I didn't miss a game mode setting on those tho.  From what I can tell the 6000 series is the mid-low end, but you really never know what you are going to get.

When I tried the Avs out in person at the lpg expo, I was disappointed by a noticeable lag that was throwing me off. Kinda bummed me out since the picture quality looked amazing, and I've been following this project since the beginning. It left me feeling deflated. I'm wondering if the tv wasn't set to PC mode and that's why it felt so off. Then again, I've been playing older consoles on crts all my life so would the smallest amount of lag be that much more noticeable to me? Hopefully I'll be able to demo one again.
I hope this project becomes a great success. Best of luck.

Yeah something might have been up with the TV, cause I've heard of world class Tetris players using bunny's wireless controllers with the AVS at a convention and reporting no noticeable lag.

I noticed this TV accepted HDMI plus analog audio. Did it accept audio through the HDMI port? If not that's a problem. Sorry you had to get rid of it. Also did your set work natively with light guns of did it upscale 240p/480i?

 

It definitely took in audio from HDMI. I had either my cable box or PS3 hooked up to it, and didn't need any other audio hookup. 2 Component, 3 S-Video, Composite, HDMI. This set was perfect for the systems I owned at the time (NES, SNES, N64, Genesis, Wii, PS3, 360, hacked Xbox). 

If I didn't get a 60" Plasma 3 years ago to hang on the wall, this one might still be sitting next to my crappy old 50" DLP. But the 60" is so big that the CRT was blocking the view of the plasma.

As for light guns, Duck Hunt definitely worked. I had no other CRTs around to compare how well it worked compared to the HD Wega though. Found a more thorough review of the set and there's some info concerning light guns in the comments.




 

always use game mode, that should turn off all of the post processing stuff (most of which just looks like butt anyways)