LG 32GQ950-B Monitor Review

The LG 32GQ950 has a slightly understated design from the front. The stand is slim but wide, and it takes up a lot of space. It has thin bezels on three sides, but unfortunately, there's a large gap of dead space between the side and top bezels and the first pixels, which is a bit distracting.

The LG 32GQ950 has good build quality overall. It feels a bit better built than previous LG UltraGear monitors, like the LG 27GP950-B. It's quite a bit thicker than most LG monitors, and it's very heavy. The base is sturdy and feels strong, and even though the back is made of plastic, it feels good.

The LG 32GQ950 has decent ergonomics. It has an excellent height adjustment and an okay tilt range, so it's easy to place it in an ideal viewing position. It doesn't swivel, and you can only rotate to portrait orientation in one direction, so the inputs will always be on the top.

The back of the monitor has a textured finish that gives it a definite gamer aesthetic. It has a hexagon RGB bias-lighting system, which you can customize to your liking. There's a hook on the back of the monitor for basic 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 of the monitor. There's a bit of wobble, but the stand supports the monitor well, and it stabilizes quickly.

You use the easy-to-use joystick control under the front bezel of the monitor to navigate the OSD.

• Power cord
• Power supply
• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B cable
• Mouse holder
• User guide

The LG 32GQ950 has a mediocre contrast ratio, so blacks look gray in a dark room. Unfortunately, the edge-lit local dimming feature is ineffective at boosting contrast with most content.

Unfortunately, the LG 32GQ950's local dimming feature is bad. It's edge-lit, with 32 zones in two rows, so each zone covers a relatively large portion of the screen. Due to the large size of each zone, any 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 the entire screen to light up. 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 can be very distracting with this setting, especially in very dark scenes with small, bright objects. Lower settings average out the backlight across more zones, which is a bit more distracting in very dark scenes, but the zone transitions aren't as noticeable.

The LG 32GQ950 has very good peak brightness in SDR. It's bright enough to overcome glare in a bright room, despite its disappointing reflection handling. There's very little variation in brightness with different scenes, and enabling or disabling local dimming makes no noticeable difference in the peak brightness.

These measurements are from after calibration in the 'Gamer 1' Picture Mode with Brightness set to max, and Local Dimming set to 'Faster'.

The LG 32GQ950-B has impressive peak brightness in HDR. It's bright enough to deliver an impactful gaming experience in HDR, and it's bright enough that even most video content looks close to the content creator's intent. Unfortunately, it can't maintain a high brightness level with large, bright scenes, and there's a significant decrease in brightness over time. The PQ EOTF follows the target curve perfectly until the peak brightness, where there's a gradual roll-off, ensuring bright highlights aren't crushed at all.

These measurements are in the 'Gamer 1' Picture Mode with HDR enabled, Local Dimming set to 'Faster', and Brightness set to max.

This monitor has a good horizontal viewing angle. The image remains consistent even if you're viewing it from the side, and the sides of the screen remain uniform even if you're sitting too close to it. The new ATW polarizer is supposed to improve contrast when viewed at an angle, but it doesn't make any measurable difference compared to the LG 27GP950-B.

The LG 32GQ950-B has a great vertical viewing angle. The image remains consistent even if you're sharing the screen with someone standing beside you or if you decide to mount it above eye level.

This monitor has very good gray uniformity. The sides of the screen are a bit darker than the center, but there's very little dirty screen effect. It's great for watching or playing sports or for anything with large areas of uniform color, including when browsing the web.

The LG 32GQ950-B has mediocre black uniformity. 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 due to the limited number of dimming zones, it's not very effective.

The LG 32GQ950-B has great accuracy out of the box. Color accuracy is good, and the sRGB mode limits colors to the sRGB color space, ensuring they're not over-saturated. The white balance is just okay, though, and brighter shades of gray are noticeably off. The color temperature is cold, giving the image a blue tint, and gamma doesn't follow the sRGB target curve well, as most scenes are darker than they should be.

Unfortunately, the sRGB mode locks you out of most picture settings. The Gamer 1 Picture Mode is the best alternative, but that results in a less accurate image as the colors are significantly over-saturated and the color temperature is even colder.

The LG 32GQ950-B has outstanding accuracy after calibration. Gamma follows the sRGB gamma curve well, ensuring everything displays at the correct brightness levels. Colors and the white balance are nearly perfect, and any remaining issues aren't noticeable. 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 LG 32GQ950-B has a superb color gamut in SDR. It covers the entire sRGB color space and has great coverage of the wider Adobe RGB color space.

The LG 32GQ950-B has fantastic color volume in SDR. It fills out the sRGB and the Adobe RGB color spaces well. Its biggest issue is that it can't display dark, saturated colors very well due to its low contrast ratio.

The LG 32GQ950-B has an excellent HDR color gamut. It has nearly complete coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used by the vast majority of HDR content. Unfortunately, it has poor coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space.

The LG 32GQ950-B has great color volume in HDR. Colors are bright and vibrant, ensuring HDR content looks vivid and lifelike. It's mainly limited by its incomplete color gamut in the Rec. 2020 color space. Due to its low contrast ratio, it can't display dark saturated colors very well.

Unfortunately, the LG 32GQ950 has disappointing reflection handling. The semi-gloss coating doesn't do much to reduce the intensity of direct reflections. Thankfully, it has very good peak brightness, so you can still overcome glare by increasing the brightness.

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

The LG 32GQ950-B has remarkable gradient handling. There's almost no banding in areas of similar color.

The LG 32GQ950-B has a fast refresh rate, delivering clear motion when gaming and a smooth desktop experience. It has an optional overclock to 160Hz, but unfortunately, it doesn't work with all devices and doesn't work consistently. We couldn't enable the overclock with our Radeon PCs, and on NVIDIA cards, it was occasionally unstable. In macOS, you're limited to 144Hz, and if you have an older graphics card that doesn't support display stream compression (DSC), the maximum refresh rate is 120Hz.

The LG 32GQ950-B supports AMD's FreeSync Premium Pro variable refresh rate (VRR) technology, but it's also certified to work with recent NVIDIA graphics cards over both HDMI and DisplayPort.

Response Time at 160Hz:

Response Time at 144Hz:

The LG 32GQ950-B has a superb response time at both 160Hz, with the optional overclock enabled, and at 144Hz on devices that don't support it. In both cases, the 'Normal' overdrive mode delivers the best results, with a very quick response time and no noticeable overshoot. The 'Fast' setting has a slightly faster rise/fall time, but there's more noticeable overshoot. Like most monitors, the fastest setting, 'Faster', has significantly more overshoot than the lower settings, but with real content, the overshoot isn't very noticeable. It's also one of the first monitors to be certified under VESA's new ClearMR certification program, receiving a ClearMR 6000 tier certification.

The response time at 120Hz is fantastic, and almost as good as at 144Hz or the max refresh rate. Motion is incredibly clear, with very little overshoot in the 'Normal' mode and almost no blur behind fast-moving objects.

The 60Hz response time is great. There's more noticeable blur behind fast-moving objects and more persistent blur due to the longer frame hold time. At 60Hz, the recommended overdrive setting is 'Off', as higher settings have more noticeable overshoot. If you prefer a single overdrive setting that performs well at all refresh rates, 'Normal' is a good alternative when gaming at 60Hz, and it's the best setting for higher refresh rates. If you want a similar monitor that has better motion handling at 60Hz, then look into the Samsung Odyssey G7/G70B S32BG70.

Unfortunately, the LG 32GQ950 doesn't have an option to introduce backlight strobing to improve motion clarity.

The backlight is nearly flicker-free at all backlight levels. It doesn't use pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight, but there's a high-frequency flicker pattern with a brightness setting of '29' or lower. It flickers at about 1282Hz below that setting, which isn't noticeable and likely won't bother people sensitive to flicker.

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

This monitor is fully compatible with the PS5. Like a few other monitors we've tested with the PS5, some games flicker when local dimming and VRR are enabled. This appears to be an issue with the VRR implementation of certain games, and it's especially noticeable with Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

This monitor can take full advantage of almost everything the Xbox Series S and X have to offer. 1440p @ 60Hz requires a forced resolution on the Xbox, though, by using the HDMI Override settings. Unfortunately, this means that variable refresh rate support isn't available with a 1440p @ 60Hz signal, but 120Hz works fine, so it's not really an issue. Like all monitors, it doesn't support Dolby Vision gaming.

The headphone jack is located on the bottom bezel, so it's a lot easier to access than previous LG UltraGear monitors.

Unfortunately, the optional overclock doesn't work with MacBooks. Everything else works fine, though, and there are no issues with the variable refresh rate feature or HDR. When waking up a MacBook from sleep, windows return to their original position, but not if you just closed the lid.

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

• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair, allows you to cheat in games that don't normally allow for crosshairs.
• FPS Counter: Shows the current frame rate received from the source.
• Black Stabilizer: Adjusts gamma to make it easier to spot objects/players in dark scenes without adjust bright 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.

The LG 32GQ950 has a very similar interface to other LG UltraGear monitors released around the same time, including the LG 27GP950-B. It's well-organized and easy to navigate.