Fastest tablet response times for iPad monitors

The monitor in a tablets is of extremely high importance to ensure good user experience. Agawi has recently tested the response times for flagship tablets and found that Apple iPads have the fastest monitors with the lowest response times.

For computer monitors, response times down to a few ms are not very difficult to find and even budget monitors can easily provide response times of only a few tens of ms. However, for tablets, the response times are generally much longer due to the feed-back system from the touch-screen mechanisms. Since the monitor of a tablet is the major central part, a lot of emphasis has been placed by the manufacturers to make bright monitors with high resolution as well as good color representations. While these things can immediately be assessed by anyone who has seen the tablet, the response time is something which can only be assessed by using the tablet, therefore, this is also one aspect that many manufacturers neglect.

Now, Agawi has performed measurements on tablet response times from a number of different manufacturers, where the flagship models are chosen. From these tests, Agawi showed that the Apple iPad Mini had the fastest monitor (75 m) followed by the iPad 4 (81 ms). In the last position came Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 with a noticeably slow response time of 168 ms. The test results by Agawi are briefly summarized in the below table.

Agawi also points out that while a low response time certainly is good, depending on the application of the users, a slower monitor may not necessarily mean that the user experience will be very bad. For example, if the user only use the tablet to read and surf, then the response time hardly matters. Whereas if the user uses the tablet to play action-packed fast games, then the slow response time of, for example, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 will definitely be apparent and will be annoying while severely impeding on the accuracy and user experience.

In any case, the recent tablet test results also are in line with previous test results by Agawi which showed that Apple iPhones in general have faster and more responsive monitors than other smartphone models.

Model	Response time
iPad Mini	75 ms
iPad 4	81 ms
nVidia Shield	92 ms
Surface RT	95 ms
Kindle Fire HD	114 ms
Nexus 7	135 ms
Galaxy Tab 3 8.0	168 ms