Those who say they have "zero" lag or "imperceptible" lag are talking relatively; all HDTVs have lag, and they just can't feel it. That
doesn't mean that
you won't feel it, however!! If you are unfortunately highly sensitive to input lag, unless they have real numbers in frames or milliseconds regarding the TV's lag, don't believe them!
If your TV is good, you'll experience less than 3 or 4 frames of lag. If your TV is really good, you'll get less than 2. The problem is that most all TVs have a lot of lag, and the number of TVs with minimal lag are, well, minimal. Those with minuscule lag on the Wii (a 480p -- not HD -- source) are even fewer, almost non-existent.
If you've already bought your TV, I guess you've learned your lesson for buying your next TV. If you haven't committed to a TV, yet, I suggest this
labyrinthical thread on AVS Forum. As a rule of thumb, Sharp and Panasonic tend to be consistently the best regarding input lag (notice that Nintendo uses almost exclusively Panasonic TVs at game shows), and Sony and Samsung rarely have good lag performance. Every TV is different, however, so don't trust a TV based on just the brand, take your Wii and super fast-paced game into the electronic store, plug it in, and
test the tv before you buy it. There are also a multitude of tools available for testing lag, available on the AVS Forum input lag thread.
Having already purchased a TV, there are a number of things you can do.
1.) Get component cables, and set your Wii to widescreen and 480p. The less stretching (
480p ->
1080p) and converting (480
i -> 480
p) your TV has to do, the faster it's going to be at converting the Wii's signal to the TV's native resolution, and the less the lag. If you're feeling lucky, you can try plugging in your laptop to the TV with a VGA cable. Using a mouse, you should be able to feel the lag pretty readily. If you don't feel any lag on your mouse at all, maybe you should look into a VGA cable for the Wii.
2.) Set your TV to
Game Mode. Nearly all HDTVs nowadays have them. Sometimes the game mode is obvious, and sometimes it's hidden in the menu. It could be a separate setting, or it could even be a picture mode. I had a TV once where the only way to activate game mode was to rename the input to GAME, and you had to reset that name every time you changed to that input to re-enable it. If you can't find it, search through your TV's manual for it. You're really going to notice a difference immediately after enabling game mode. You can usually also see a visual difference immediately -- try turning game mode on and off, and you'll probably see that turning it off makes the TV blurrier, maybe shakier, or the contrast might get worse... This is a good thing; it's turning off all of the processor-heavy effects that make your picture pretty, but also
lag your picture.
3.) Turn off all of the rest of the video processing that you can find in the menu. Turn off active contrast, turn off 120hz/240fps/etc (or TruMotion, or Film Mode or whatever it's called on your set), turn off digital noise reduction, everything that you can bear. Any processing your TV is doing to the picture are precious milliseconds that it's using before displaying the picture to the screen.
Hopefully this helps. Again, you can check
AVS Forum for tons of information on this subject.
