Ok I've had a chance to test it out. The ghosting is horrible in Half Life. Of course, Half Life doesn?t not have 1280x1024 as an option so it's hard to tell if the ghosting is due to the monitor itself or the fact that it's not at the native rr (perhaps a bit of both).
The Matrix DVD looked pretty good from what I saw. The lobby scene is useless, since it's pretty much all in slow-mo. However, the fight scene between Morpheous and Neo showed little or no ghosting. Also, the intro, which is pretty fast paced, had little to no ghosting.
3D mark had very little ghosting at the native res of the monitor. However, the ghosting wasn't that bad at 1024x768 either! I think 3D mark is a bad method of testing the ghosting because most, if not all of the scenes are in 3rd person, slow, or have camera angles that you would not actually use while playing. When you are playing a FPS for example, you are making RAPID movements with your mouse from left to right, up and down; THESE are the instances where ghosting shows up the most. Slow or 3rd person movement isn't the best torture test for ghosting.
My mouse does not seem to ghost at all. When I rapidly move it, I see can see maybe 3 or 4 mice pointers at a time, but I'm pretty sure this happened with my CRT as well. I think its due to the refresh rate of our eyes, and not the monitor, just like if I rapidly move a pencil from left to right - I see many pencils. I would definitely not describe this as "trails"; the mouse pointer is not trailing at all.
Other than that, the monitor is beautiful. Clear type is awesome and makes the text extremely crisp and easy to look at. Clear type was useless and hindering on my CRT, but on this LDC it's amazing.
The LCD is really bright; I turned it down to 5 and set the monitor to Work mode. I'd be interested in hearing what settings other people are using.
Overall, a great deal at this price. The positives far outweigh the negatives; this is definitely a keeper.