Striped blocks at half, full and double speed. Follow one with your eyes: trails behind it are ghosting, bright halos are overshoot, and how much you see is your panel's real motion performance — not the number on its box.
Run it
3 speeds · ←→ speed · ↑↓ background · Esc to exit
Default speed is 960 px/s — the standard for motion tests. The slider goes from a stroll to a sprint.
How to run it
Start the test and let your eyes follow the middle block — smooth pursuit, the way you'd track a car passing. Ghosting hides when you stare at a fixed point.
Look at the trailing edge of the block and its stripes. Clean edges: good. A gray shadow peeling off: ghosting. A bright outline hugging the edge: overdrive overshoot.
Cycle backgrounds with ↑↓. Dark backgrounds expose slow dark transitions (VA smearing); light ones show the opposite corner of the matrix.
Vary speed with ←→. Faster motion spreads the same lag over more pixels, making a marginal panel obvious.
What you're actually seeing
Three effects stack in this test, and separating them is the whole diagnostic. Ghosting is pixel lag — trails dimmer than the object, colored by whatever transition is slow. Overshoot is the cure applied too hard: overdrive voltage slamming pixels past their target, leaving bright or inverted halos. Sample-and-hold blur is neither defect — it's every modern display holding each frame still while your eye sweeps, and it scales with refresh rate: at 60 Hz each frame smears across twice the retina distance it does at 120 Hz. A perfect panel at 60 Hz still blurs; a mediocre one at 144 Hz may look cleaner. That's also why this test reads differently after you confirm your real refresh rate — half of "my monitor ghosts" cases are a 144 Hz panel quietly running at 60.
One method note, in fairness to your panel: judging motion by eye is repeatable but not photographic — eye-tracking speed varies person to person. Review sites answer the same question with a pursuit camera; what you see here is what you get, which for a monitor you own is the measurement that matters. The full background on response times, overdrive and blur reduction modes is in Monitor ghosting, response time and motion blur explained.
Faint trails behind moving objects, left by pixels that can’t change color fast enough — the previous frame is still fading while the next one draws. It’s a panel response-time issue, worst on dark-to-mid transitions and on VA panels, and it lives in the display, not in your PC. If the trails are brighter than the object, that’s overshoot: the monitor’s overdrive pushing pixels past their target.
What’s the difference between ghosting and motion blur?
Ghosting is the panel being slow; motion blur is physics. On any sample-and-hold display (every LCD and OLED), each frame sits still while your eye tracks a moving object across it, smearing the image on your retina — even with an instant panel. That’s why an OLED with near-zero response time still shows blur in this test, and why the only real cures are higher refresh rates or backlight strobing.
How do I fix ghosting?
Find the overdrive setting in the monitor’s menu — it hides under names like Response Time, OD, TraceFree or AMA — and step through its levels while watching this test. Too low leaves trails; too high replaces them with bright coronas. The sweet spot is almost never the maximum. Also check the refresh rate is actually set to the panel’s rating (our refresh rate test verifies it), and on VA panels accept that some dark-scene smear is the technology, not a fault.
Is some ghosting normal?
Yes. Liquid crystals take a few milliseconds to twist, so a faint short trail at high speed is ordinary LCD behavior, and marketing’s “1 ms” figures describe best-case transitions, not typical ones. Worry when trails are long and obvious at everyday scrolling speeds, when they’re strongly colored, or when bright coronas follow every dark edge — those are worth an overdrive adjustment or, on a new monitor, a return.
Why test on different backgrounds?
Because response time depends on which gray the pixel starts from and lands on. VA panels famously smear on black backgrounds (the slow dark-to-dark transitions), look fine on mid gray, and IPS glow shows most against black. Cycling the background with the ↑↓ keys or the picker isolates which transitions your panel struggles with — one background tells you one row of the response-time matrix.