EricM407, you might be right about that, mainly because I don't know enough about the decay physics of LCDs.

But consider this: When you watch a movie at a theater, they are shown at 24 frames a second (exotic digital possibilities aside). But it is my understanding that the projector film gate artificially disrupts the projection of each frame so that the eye is given 48 images to watch. A shutter runs through each frame. The purpose of this is to up the flicker rate to make the strobe effect of 24 frames less noticeable. They do this in spite of the fact that the human eye has its own persistence of vision, much like a poor LCD pixel. (That's why you can see a trailing image of your arm if you move it quickly in front of your body.) Likewise, home NTSC TV introduces that beneficial shutter effect by running half a frame information on one field, followed by the other half on a subsequent interlaced field. Each field is up for 1/60th of a second.

A low response rate of an LCD pixel comes into play when it does not refresh the image very quickly. That is, a bright pixel from one frame could be on-screen and still decaying even as the frame has already been updated with a new, perhaps darker, scene.

Certainly, a movie cannot be updated with new frames any quicker than was originally filmed (ie: 24 frames per second) nor any quicker than encoded onto a DVD (ie: 24 frames... or even 30 frames) but a high screen refresh rate will at least rid the viewer of the irritating strobe effect that can often be seen in bright NTSC sources and, for me, all PAL sources.

I think any image would benefit from a flicker rate higher than 60 cycles per second.

RBG