Hello it_burns, First thing I am gonna say is this. I noticed that the two screens in your photo look wildly different in color and brightness, gamma. Every screen is different. They need to be calibrated to make accurate judgements on color and gamma. At the very least use either the program on the 215TW CD or the program in the nVidia control panel to do basic adjustments to each monitor and then look at them through on this page:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

For color I would take pics with a digital camera and have them printed , some place like Wal-Mart or Target will do because those printers will be set up to be neutral and not to any specific monitor. Hold the pics up to the monitor and compare the colors, dynamic range, and detail in the shadows and highlights. Don’t worry about any tint as that won’t be accurate without proper calibration.

Now, I hate to say this but in regards to input lag, You’re not making a lot of sense. First you say that everything is fine, and you even games on it and there was no problem. To quote:
I went through some pictures, checkmon, a movie and 2 games (dark and light maps).
Then all of a sudden you hear of an input lag problem from Garret and now what happens?
the delay is obvious in a fast paced FPS but less noticable in other things. a film seemed to be out of sync which i assumed was poor codec use but played it again on the HP & it was fine!!
Wtf, I thought the games and movie was fine a min ago? Garrett was kind enough to post some photo of a test you can do. The lag with his Dell (which he “coulnt be happier with”) was 3.6ms.
Lets look at your tests results, the difference in ms , 215TW vs. HP: 4.6ms, 3.2ms 6.3ms, 4.2ms, and 4.8ms. Average = 4.6. (just subtracting stop watch times)

3.6ms vs. 4.6ms of lag. thats nothing dude. No way is 1ms of lag going to make lips not match and be ‘obvious’ in fast paced FPS games. It might pose a problem with FPS games if you are a Pro gamer, but Pro gamers always use CRTs or at the minimum a gaming oriented TN Panel. Neither the Dell nor the Samsung is TN, hence the slight lag, but in return you get 8 bit color.
I looked at the YouTube videos. All the tests were done with the person was moving their cursor slower than you. You were going faster to achieve the same effect in my opinion.

I want to add is that the majority of LCD HDTVs out there lag by at least 10-15ms. It has to do with the size, and the fact that unless it’s a 1080p TV displaying 1080p, they are almost never displayed at native resolution. Most 720p monitors use 1366x768 so both 1080i and 720p must be resized. DVD, 480p must always be resized, and anything I must always be deinterlaced, which causes lag. This always attributes to input lag on a HDTV. It’s not a huge problem because console FPS games are not fast paced, but it’s something to consider when thinking about lips not matching in video. According to Garrett’s linked Wikipedia article I will take one line:

“Input lag contributes to the overall latency in the interface chain of the user's inputs (mouse, keyboard, etc...) to the graphics card to the monitor. Most sensitive users can tolerate latency under 20ms.”
I have no doubt that there are affected 215TW’s out there, as evidenced by YouTube, but I thought I might save you the time of switching out LCDs and thinking you still have the laggy one because your just looking at the raw data; I think it’s best to just play a game and see if your performance is affected. I really don’t think that you have one of the laggy 215TWs, for several reasons:
a) You were moving your mouse faster than the people in YouTube to achieve the same effect, they were moving it painfully slowly across the screen yet lag was still there.
b) The stopwatch photos showed your LCD to be hardly behind a TN panel, TN panels hardly lag at all, even if a TN panel lags ½ as much as Garrett’s Dell, that still puts the Samsung at roughly 6ms of lag. Still not a huge deal.
c) Garrett noticed his mouse to have a slow response right away, you played games and watched movies and didn’t notice anything until someone told you.

I have one question for Garrett: when you had a 215TW did you ever take a picture with a CRT to measure the lag? If so what was the difference in times? For you to notice it right away with the mouse, or look like the ones I saw on YouTube, my guess is that’s its much higher than what it_burns is getting.

Hopefully Garrett can answer. If the time differences were significantly larger than 4.6ms, I think we can assume that you do not have the laggy 215TW, and you need to decide if just S-PVA panels aren’t fast enough for you and you need a TN like the HP. If they are right around 5ms, than you can try once more for a switch I suppose.

All LCDs lag. It’s just how much they lag and does that amount really affect what you do with the screen. You are going have to make a choice on how Pro of a gamer you are. S-IPS can have ghosting problems. TN panels cannot possibly be 8 bit. And S-PVA panels have input lag. In my opinion being 4.6ms behind a TN panel is very good. But that’s just my opinion. Do you have a CRT to compare to? Maybe you can get how far behind the Samsung is to Garrets Dell? You know the one he “couldn’t be happier with”

I’m brand new LCD owner and it’s a Samsung 215TW btw, and I play CS 1.6 on small deathmatch maps filled with people, consider myself quite good, and see no noticeable impact on my gaming performance. After reading your thread, I even re hooked up my CRT monitor in clone mode and played on LCD and CRT back to back several rounds and noticed no difference. If I sit back I can see differences, very minor, but who cares, my performance or gaming experience didn’t go down any.

Made in Mexico March 2007 btw.

Sorry if I’m coming off harsh, but it just amazes me that the second someone mentions a problem then you notice lips not matching on a movie when it was no problem before. Hilarious. Stop looking at the data and play the game and see if you start sucking or if your still good.