What Ghosting Looks Like and What Causes It
A trailing smear behind moving objects, most visible on fast motion — here's what's actually happening on the panel, and what does and doesn't fix it.
Ghosting is a faint trailing image left behind a moving object — most obvious in fast-scrolling text, fast-panning camera shots, or competitive games. It's one of the more annoying display faults because it's motion-dependent: a monitor can look perfectly sharp in every static screenshot and still ghost badly in actual use.
What's actually happening
Every LCD pixel takes a small, non-zero amount of time to change from one colour to the next — this is the panel's response time, usually quoted in milliseconds (grey-to-grey, or GtG). If a pixel can't fully finish transitioning before the next frame arrives, you see a faint remnant of the old frame smeared behind the new one. Slower panels (older or budget IPS and especially VA panels) have longer response times and ghost more; fast TN and modern OLED panels ghost the least.
Testing for it
Run the ghosting test and increase the speed slider until the motion is fast enough to stress the panel. Watch specifically for a soft trailing smear behind the moving block, not the block itself — a sharp, clean edge with nothing behind it is a panel with good response time.
What actually reduces ghosting
- Overdrive / response time settings in the monitor's OSD menu. Most monitors have a setting (often called "Response Time," "OD," or similar) that pushes extra voltage to speed up pixel transitions. Turning it up usually helps ghosting — but turning it up too far causes the opposite problem, inverse ghosting (a bright halo instead of a dark smear).
- A higher refresh rate, since more frames per second means less distance for a slow-transitioning pixel to visibly lag behind. See our refresh rate test for a rough in-browser check.
- Nothing you can do in software fixes a genuinely slow panel. If overdrive settings don't help, the response time is a hardware limitation of that specific display technology.
Ghosting is not the same fault as input lag (delay between your action and the screen updating) — a monitor can have great input lag and still ghost badly, or vice versa. They're measured, and fixed, differently.