Almost all LCDs will give you sharp, clear text and good image quality for Web browsing and other basic work tasks. However, when it comes to displaying moving images, such as those in games and videos, LCDs differ greatly. The best indicator of how well a monitor will render moving images is response time, which typically refers to the time required for an LCD pixel to change from fully off (black) to fully on (white), then fully off again. It serves as a rough indicator of how quickly the screen can refresh a video image. However, in most real-life games and videos, pixels are rarely completely on or off. Instead, they mostly cycle between so-called gray states--that is, colors. Generally, switching between gray states is far slower than switching between black and white, so the true refresh time may be a lot slower than the spec indicates. Still, a monitor rated at 12 milliseconds (ms) is faster than one rated at 20ms and will have better video and gaming performance.

Also, check out the performance section of our latest LCD monitor reviews to get an idea of how well they perform on gaming, video, text, and color.