LG 32GQ950-B  Monitor Review

The LG 32GQ950-B has a simple, yet gaming-oriented design. It's mainly dark gray and has some RGB lighting on the back where it houses the inputs. The physical bezels are thin, but there's noticeable dead space between them and where the pixels start.

The build quality is good. It's well-made without any issues, and while the materials don't feel very premium, they aren't cheap either. The plastic on the back doesn't flex much under pressure, and the stand holds the screen well with minimal wobble.

The ergonomics are decent. You can adjust it for yourself in a few ways, but without swivel adjustment, it's harder to turn the screen for someone next to you. As you can only adjust it into portrait mode in one direction, the inputs will always be on the top. There's a clip on the stand for cable management.

The stand is wide, but there's a lot of space between the legs, so you can still place other things in front. It supports the monitor well and stabilizes quickly after wobbling.

There's a joystick underneath the bottom bezel to control the on-screen display, and it's easy to use.

• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Power supply and cable
• Mouse bungee clips
• User guides

This monitor has a mediocre contrast ratio. Blacks look gray next to bright highlights, and the local dimming feature is ineffective at improving the contrast.

The local dimming feature is bad. It's edge-lit, with 32 zones split in two rows, so the zones are big. Any bright object on the screen causes a large area of the screen to light up, resulting in significant blooming. The local dimming feature does very little with real content, as most scenes cause all zones to light up, and they're ineffective at improving the contrast. On the other hand, there's barely any black crush, with very little loss of fine details in some scenes.

There are three different settings for the local dimming feature. Adjusting this setting adjusts how quickly the backlight reacts to fast-moving objects, but the difference between settings isn't very noticeable. The 'Faster' setting delivers the best results overall, but zone transitions are very distracting with this setting. The less aggressive settings average out the backlight across more zones, so the zone transitions aren't as noticeable, but there's more blooming.

Settings

• Picture Mode Mode: Gamer 1 (after calibration)
• Brightness: Max
• Local Dimming: Faster

This monitor has very good brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to overcome glare in a bright room. There's very little variation in brightness with different content, and enabling or disabling local dimming makes no noticeable difference in brightness.

Settings

• Picture Mode Mode: Gamer 1
• HDR: On
• Brightness: Max
• Local Dimming: Faster

The HDR brightness is impressive. It gets very bright for an impactful HDR experience, but its local dimming feature fails to make small highlights pop against the rest of the image. The PQ EOTF tracks the target curve well until there's a slow roll-off at the peak brightness, so it doesn't let highlights get the brightest they could.

This monitor has a good horizontal viewing angle. The image remains consistent even if you're viewing it from the side, which is ideal for sharing your screen with others.

The vertical viewing angle is impressive. The image remains consistent if you're standing up and looking down on the screen.

This monitor has great gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are a bit darker than the center, but there's very little dirty screen effect in the center.

The black uniformity is mediocre. With local dimming disabled, the screen is cloudy throughout, and there's some distracting backlight bleed along the top and bottom edges. Enabling local dimming reduces cloudiness in dark areas of the screen but introduces blooming instead.

The accuracy before calibration is great. The sRGB mode limits colors well to the sRGB color space, but the white balance is off, and the color temperature is on the cold side, giving the image a blue tint. Even gamma doesn't follow the target curve well, as most scenes are darker than intended.

Unfortunately, the sRGB mode locks you out of most picture settings, including Response Time. You'd have to use another mode with more oversaturated colors if you want access to those settings.

The LG 32GQ950-B has outstanding accuracy after calibration. Any remaining issues are hard to notice. Unlike the vast majority of monitors, this monitor supports hardware calibration through LG's Calibration Studio, so you can enjoy an accurate image from any source, even if the source doesn't support ICC profiles.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic. It covers the entire sRGB color space and has great coverage of the wider Adobe RGB color space.

This monitor an excellent HDR color gamut. It has nearly complete coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used by the vast majority of HDR content. However, it has more limited coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space.

The HDR color volume is impressive. It displays most colors well at a wide range of luminance levels but struggles with really bright colors.

The LG 32GQ950-B delivers fantastic text clarity thanks to its high pixel density. Even in apps that aren't compatible with Windows ClearType settings (bottom photo), the text is sharp and easy to read.

The reflection handling is disappointing. Reflections from bright light sources, like opposite a window, make the screen hard to see. If you want something similar with much better reflection handling, check out the LG 32GR93U-B.

The gradient handling is remarkable. There's almost no banding in areas of similar color.

This monitor has an optional overclock that only works with NVIDIA graphics cards over DisplayPort, and you need to enable VRR to use it. However, it's not always stable, as it can sometimes turn off when switching applications, forcing you to turn it back on.

On top of supporting FreeSync VRR and G-SYNC compatibility, it also supports HDMI Forum VRR.

This monitor has impressive motion handling across its VRR range. The 'Normal' Response Time overdrive is very consistent, even as the refresh rate drops, and there isn't much blur with fast-moving objects. The 'Faster' overdrive has such a high CAD that it passes the limits of the chart, but you can see its performance in an alternative chart.

The refresh rate compliance is great. Although its response time isn't fast enough to make full color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame at the max refresh rate, it's better at lower refresh rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 160Hz is great. Motion looks sharp with the 'Fast' overdrive setting, as it has less blur than 'Normal' and less inverse ghosting than 'Faster.'

The CAD at 120Hz is great. There isn't much blur with fast-moving objects, but unlike at the max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive is 'Normal' because 'Fast' has more overshoot.

The CAD at 60Hz is great. Although there's a bit of blur, motion still looks good with the 'Normal' overdrive. The more aggressive 'Fast' and 'Faster' settings have more inverse ghosting.

The LG 32GQ950 doesn't have an option to introduce backlight strobing to reduce persistence blur.

This monitor has a bit of VRR flicker with changing frame rates in dark scenes, which is worse in person than in the video, but it isn't super distracting either.

The backlight is flicker-free at most brightness levels, but there's flicker with the brightness level at '29' and below. It flickers at such a high frequency, more than 1200Hz, that you won't notice it.

The LG 32GQ950-B has low input lag, delivering a responsive gaming or desktop experience.

This monitor works well with the Xbox Series X|S, but you need to use the console's HDMI override to get 1440p @ 60Hz to work, which disables VRR. Keep in mind that the console only supports HDR with 4k signals, so this isn't a limitation of the monitor.

The audio port supports DTS Headphone:X.

This monitor works well with macOS, but the max refresh rate is limited to 144Hz. Everything else works fine, though, and there are no issues with VRR or HDR. When waking up a MacBook from sleep, windows return to their original position, but not if you close the lid.

The LG 32GQ950-B has a few extra features, including:

• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair that your game's anti-cheat tool won't detect.
• FPS Counter: Shows the current frame rate from the source.
• Black Stabilizer: Adjusts gamma to make it easier to spot objects/players in dark scenes.
• DAS (Dynamic Action Sync): Helps minimize input lag. This feature is enabled automatically when playing at the monitor's maximum refresh rate and can't be disabled.