All monitors can have some blur, so some clever monitor manufactures implemented strobe features, strobe tuning or backlight strobing on the screen to increase the appeared speed and performance of their displays.
This can provide fluid like clarity to the display by impacting the brightness to support your gaming and provide a crystal clear experience.
Blur busters have become the industry standard in the monitor reviewers world when it comes to testing panel displays for motion blur reduction and whether you can adjust your displays settings.
What is motion blur reduction?
You’ve just bought your new gaming monitor, great graphics, a fast refresh rate with max hz and much better than the old laptops you used to game on. But there is one noticeable issue, especially when you game at night, there is still motion blur.
Making it difficult for you to enjoy your new monitor with quick refresh cycles.
Luckily blur busters can help here.
Essentially the blur reduction setting built into some monitors allow a strobe utility to create motion clarity, helpful especially in fast paced games with vibrant visuals.
Companies have all come up with their own unique motion blur reduction technologies. ASUS has the extreme low motion blur (ELMB), NVIDIA has lightboost and ultra low motion blur, BenQ has Dynamic arruracy, Samsung has their 1ms MPRT – moving picture response time. The list for other companies goes on but you get the picture.
While the approaches are different for companies the idea is the same, create motion clarity on the monitor frame by using some kind of strobe feature or factory tuning.
What does blur busters approved mean?
Who are blur busters?
Blur busters are a monitor review company that unlike other monitor reviews tests strobing tuning, strobe crosstalk, vrr strobing, frame rate and refresh rates for multiple vendors to determine whether the motion blur reduction approach taken is effective.
What does blur busters approved mean?
Initially the blur buster approved certification meant a monitor was tested and tuned by blur busters to ensure the performance of the backlight strobe met the test and was up to par.
There is a list of specific criteria that were in the monitors test like ensure less strobe crosstalk, more refresh rate options at which the blur reduction tech could work at that the strobe utility could be adjusted.
When it comes to monitor reviewers, blur busters approved was the industry standard.
What about the new blur busters approved?
Blur busters implemented a second iteration of the strobe tuning and testing to ensure the backlight strobing still met the blur busters standards but also worked at high refresh rates and kept input lag (which can be a problem with overdrive gain for monitors with strobe) low.
Basically blue busters approved meant blur reduction worked at higher speed monitors with the same efficiency. Blur busters forums should give you more information about the blur busters approved monitors available the the test criteria used.
When should you use motion blur reduction?
Any monitor that is blur busters approved should have a strobe utility built well enough for gaming. This is the main reason to use a blur reduction monitor. Gaming monitors are also built with a high frame rate and fast refresh rate, so combining these two technologies should work well for gaming displays.
Increasing the refresh rate
Before motion blur reduction technology was around the primary way to reduce blur was to increase the refresh rate and thereby increase the frame rate of the monitor.
This is still a great option, increasing the refresh rate should reduce blur instead of a strobe on most monitors.
On most monitors this can be done in the advanced settings menu.
How to enable the motion blur reduction on your monitor?
Step one is figuring out if your monitor has the built in MBR technology available.
If your monitor is on the blur busters approved list, then great you already know. If not, you might have to do some digging on the monitor website, monitor support services or blur busters themselves.
Once you’ve figured out your screen has this option the next step if finding out what it is called on your gaming monitor. All monitors have different features, which are just fancy ways to tell you about the display and graphics so again you’ll have to figure out what your monitor calls this feature.
Then you should be able to go into the gaming monitors setting and adjust the displays strobe (or whatever other feature name they have given it) and viola! You’re ready to rock.
Motion blur reduction in gaming
As we mentioned earlier, the main reason to use MBR and strobe utility settings is to increase gaming experience. In fact this is what the technology was invented for and what blur busters aims to help with.
Playing a game with MBR enabled allows you to get the jump on opponents especially in first person shooter games with pressure spots (even better when you are playing at night and brightness is lower).
The smooth, fast moving frames in the game supported by strobing creates a create in game experience.
Will blur reduction increase the input lag?
This can be a big issue for gamers and one blur busters considers as well, increasing the input lag isn’t great for gaming and can be the last thing you want.
In some cases it will increase input lag so you’ll have to decide if it is worth the trade off and whether you notice the difference.
The only time this definitely isn’t the case and blur reduction won’t have an impact on input lag is when using G-sync and free-sync monitors.
Are there any downsides to motion blur reduction?
Like all technology, especially one that some monitors and panels implement and not other hardware companies is there are trade offs to consider. Blur reduction technology does have downsides.
Mainly it can reduce brightness and frame rate of some monitors. If you primarily game in a dark room at night this can lead to eye strain and impact your gaming experience.
However if you have a high end monitor with a great display you might not even notice this so it really depends on your display.
Similarly, the color performance of the display might be sub-optimal when this technology is turned on. It is worth pointing out, like some panel features, you can turn this off easily.
And as mentioned above it can impact input lag.
Given you can turn the display feature on and off it could be a case of having it and not needing it is better than needing it and not having it.