Originally Posted by NetHorse

It's not the same..If it were, we would all be saving a ton of money by using LCD TVs for a fraction of the price. ;)

CRT, LCD and plasma displays all have very different characteristics, and how the display controllers work to optimize video presentation vary depending upon the display type. In the case of LCD, we usually think of it as a "sample and hold" display technology -- you set a pixel blue, for example, and it stays blue. It doesn't get refreshed, the way the phosphor does in a CRT. In a computer display, you have a pixel-addressable screen; only the pixels that change are actually being written. But in a video display, the whole screen is changing continuously, and this can cause all sorts of smearing, shimmering, and ghosting artifacts because of the way the panel behaves.

This is why LCD TV's and LCD computer monitors are different, the TCON controllers that drive the panel behave differently in a TV set; they are designed to continually modify all of the pixels. There are different sorts of bias currents sent to the panel to essentially prepare them for the refresh. If this isn't done, what happens is that there is smearing because the pixels have a certain "response time," which is how long it takes them to change from one state to another.