Monitor Ghosting Test
Three rows of blocks glide at different speeds over a patterned background. Follow one with your eyes: crisp edges mean fast pixels, smeared trails mean ghosting.
Follow a block with your eyes. A crisp leading edge with a smeared, darker or inverted trail behind it is ghosting — slow pixel response. Trails that get dramatically worse at higher speeds are normal on 60 Hz office monitors; strong trails at low speed suggest enabling your monitor's overdrive setting (often called Response Time / OD).
Ghosting happens when pixels can't change color as fast as the frames arrive — the previous frame lingers as a trail. It's worst on budget VA panels and mild on fast IPS and OLED. Two distinct artifacts to look for: a dark smear behind the block is classic slow response, while a bright or inverted halo ahead of it is overshoot from too-aggressive overdrive. Your monitor's overdrive setting (called Response Time, OD, or TraceFree) is the lever: step it up until smearing stops, and back off one notch if halos appear. Judge at your actual refresh rate — ghosting at 60 Hz often vanishes at 144 Hz simply because frames change less per pixel transition.