In multiplayer, the game has to keep track of your actions and the actions of everyone else in the game with you. The delay between button press and visual feedback is usually called "response time," though it's not uncommon to see the terms "response time" and "input lag" used incorrectly. It tracks the time difference between a button press and a visual response, while we're concerned with the difference between signal arrival and visual response. That's in addition to any lag added by your display (their testing included a check against a reference CRT monitor - not perfect, but better than nothing). In Eurogamer's testing of console games, those running at 60 frames per second had an inherent lag of 67 milliseconds (4 frames), while 30 fps games had a minimum inherent lag of 100 milliseconds (6 frames). A May 2009 article in Eurogamer called Console Gaming: The Lag Factor revealed that console games can be inherently laggy. While input lag gets a lot of attention, it is not the only source of gaming lag. If you delay the audio, it doesn't remove the core problem - you find out about events after they've already happened. You can't do that with games, though, because games require your input in response to what's shown on the screen. If you're just watching movies or video and input lag is severe enough to cause lip-synch errors, you can correct it with an audio delay that slows down the audio track until it is in synch with the video. Input lag is of special importance when working with video games because games are interactive. When playing video games, you'll press a button and notice a significant delay before the game responds - or you'll respond to a timed prompt on screen, and despite thinking you've nailed it, you miss your cue. When watching movies or video, you might notice that the sound arrives before the picture does, so people's lips don't match their words, or you hear gun shots in action movies before the character on screen has actually fired. When lag is particularly bad, you will likely notice that something is wrong.
In other words, there are a lot of things that can slow down an image in transit. Automatic irises adjust themselves based on the average illumination in a scene, which (you guessed it) adds processing time. If you're using advanced features like frame interpolation or smart sharpening, those frames of video must be analyzed in sequence and altered before reaching the screen, which adds processing time. When that image isn't in the projector's native resolution, it has to be scaled, and that can add processing time. That's just the nature of digital video processing - the projector has to take a stream of ones and zeroes and reconstitute it as an image. All digital projectors, regardless of their specifications or intended use, will incur some amount of input lag.
This is the time difference between when a video signal arrives at your projector and when that picture is displayed on the screen. However, we're primarily concerned with input lag. The term "lag" can refer to any time difference.
While lag cannot be eliminated, reducing it is key to a great gaming experience. This difference - the time between when an event occurs and when you see it occur - is called lag. The difference between "now" and "a fraction of a second from now" can be the difference between victory and defeat. When playing certain video games, it isn't just every second that counts - it's every millisecond.
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