The Christmas holidays are a chance to put in some serious time console gaming. Excellent. Um, except for the fact that last week, at least, my gaming talents appear to have completely deserted me.

Seriously, it's bizarre. I used to hold my own against most of the Yanks playing Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 online, or strum my guitar in perfect time with the music on Guitar Hero III. But last week I was getting shotguns in my face before I'd even noticed anyone was there, and my musical timing was so bad that Brian May was crying into his magnificently unfashionable hair.

Bad reflexes or technical troubles?

What's going on? Was my age suddenly catching up with me? Were my reflexes giving up the ghost? Thankfully, no. It turns out the reason for my new-found crapness was, in fact, my TV. Let me explain...

The main review product in my life recently has been Philips' massive and actually rather magnificent 52PFL9632D. Watching films and TV on this 52-inch beast is an absolutely joy, as it produces quite possibly the finest big-screen LCD pictures I've seen to date. Even my HD games on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 look totally gorgeous.

But it's impossible to ignore the fact that my sudden downturn in gaming skills coincided with the 52PFL9632D's arrival. And now I come to think of it, I had a similar skills blip when Philips sent its 'Aurea' TV to me a couple of weeks back. Hmm.

To check if this was just a coincidence, I fired up an old Sagem DLP rear projection TV I've got lying around (!), stuck on Guitar Hero III again, and lo: I was plucking all the right chords in all the right places. Phew.

What? Why? How?

But exactly how, you're doubtless wondering, could the Philips TVs be affecting my reflexes? Am I being put off by Philips' Ambilight system or something?

The answer actually lies in the vast amount of image processing Philips applies to the 52PFL9632D's pictures before producing them on its screen.

For powerful though the TV's processors are, the sheer amount of operations they're having to perform on the picture means there's a slight delay between the pictures arriving at the TV's inputs and them finally appearing on screen. And it's this delay that appears to be turning me into a gaming eunuch.

You see, I'm only reacting to what I'm seeing on screen, yet because of the TV processing lag, what I'm seeing on screen is no longer what my consoles are seeing. They've moved on without me. The result is that I constantly look rubbish.

Gaming lag

After some experimentation, it turned out that I could make the situation marginally better on the 52PFL9632D by deactivating as many optional elements of its video processing as possible. But I never managed to get completely back on top of my game.

I don't mean to suggest in this blog that nobody buys any of Philips' new TVs. Far from it; they're actually class-leading performers with video sources, as I suggested earlier. But if you're a really dedicated gamer, the sort of problems I've described probably do need to play a part in a TV buying decision.

Ideally you'd actually take Guitar Hero III into a store with you to try on different TVs. But given that this is hardly practical, you may actually find yourself in the seemingly daft situation of having to look at relatively low-rent TVs with minimal video processing systems!

Sigh. All in all, this is starting to look like yet another reason to finally hang up my joysticks and do something more useful with my spare time instead. Yeah, right...