How can I avoid/reduce HDTV lag?

[Soccermom]

Just wanted to add my input to the discussion.

I have an 40 inch samsung screen (LE40F86) and I am also suffering from quite a lot of input lag. It is possible to reduce the lag to 35-40ms, if I turn on game mode and turn off all picture processing (as assessed by my audio sync delay on my Onkyo875 - not a true time watch test, I know).

With regard to WO, the input is very noticeable especially when doing barrel rolls. When I hook up my 22 inch computer display with 2ms lag, the game feels a lot more responsive (BRs, side shifting and smooth cornering are a lot easier).
I am not willing to sacrifice the full HD experience so I have had to learn to live with the delay. However, if I had to buy a new TV today, input lag would be very high up on the priority list (I did not play WO when I bought the TV )

Basically, I would urge all WO addicts to really check the specs on input lag on a new LCD purchase. It is very rarely advertised and often not mentioned in tests, so check/ask on sites like AVSforum (excellent forum btw.) before you spend your hard-earned money.

A final comment on minimum input lag. It is not possible to reduce input lag to an absolute 0. A LCD screen always buffers one full frame before displaying, so the minimum absolute 0 value for a game running in 60 FPS will be 1/60 of a second. Thus, my HDTV has a total input lag of 35-40 ms (picture processing lag) + 16.6ms.

EDIT: If you are experiencing bad input lag. The first thing to try is to turn off all special picture processing from the TV's menu (usually you would want to do that anyway) and make sure the PS3 is outputting the signal at the screens native resolution. Smooting, DNLe etc. taxes the processing a lot and on most TVs (except very very highend products), the built in scaler does not do a good job.
I have a dedicated scaler (REON chip) in my Onkyo and with that enabled, WO becomes almost unplayable (albeit very good looking )

I have a 2 year old Panasonic Viera Plasma (1080i) hooked up with HDMI cable. Haven't noticed any lag. However, I use an optical cable from the TV to my stereo and there is audio lag, so when I play quick twitch games like WOHD I just use the TV audio.

"the audio lag" you are decribing is input lag. Relaying sound has virtually no delay and hence it arrives before the picture does. Your TV is compensating for the lag when your are channeling your audio through that.