LG 32GN650-B/32GN63T-B Monitor Review

The monitor has a fairly clean and simple design with a V-shaped stand and red accents.

The build quality is adequate. It's made of decent-quality plastics, though the plastic piece on the stand used for cable management feels somewhat flimsy. There's a lot of wobble in the monitor at its maximum height, and even moving the joystick causes it to shake significantly.

The ergonomics are decent. It's fine if you want to adjust the screen for yourself, but without swivel adjustment, it's hard to turn the screen to show someone else. The back of the monitor is simple, with a red circle similar to other UltraGear monitors. The stand features a clip for cable management.

The stand supports the monitor fairly well; however, the screen wobbles quite a bit when it's at its maximum height.

The joystick below the LG branding turns the monitor on and off and navigates the settings menu.

• DisplayPort cable
• Power cable
• Mouse bungee clip
• User manuals (paper and CD)

The contrast ratio is great. It displays deep blacks next to bright highlights, making it a good choice for darker environments. However, it doesn't have a local dimming feature to improve the contrast further.

This monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The SDR brightness is decent. It gets bright enough to fight glare in most well-lit rooms, though it struggles to overcome glare in very bright situations like the sun shining on it. Additionally, its brightness stays consistent across different content. These results are from after calibration in the 'Gamer 1' Picture Mode with the Brightness at its max.

The brightness in HDR is mediocre. Without a local dimming feature, it doesn't make highlights pop in HDR. It displays most scenes at their correct brightness because the monitor follows the PQ EOTF curve fairly well. These results are from the 'Gamer 2' Picture Mode, with HDR enabled and Brightness at its max.

The horizontal viewing angle is disappointing. The image looks washed out from the sides, making sharing content with a friend or co-worker more difficult.

The vertical viewing angle is disappointing, and the image is inconsistent if you stand up and look down at the monitor.

The gray uniformity is good. While the edges of the screen look a bit darker, there's minimal dirty screen effect in the center.

The monitor has decent black uniformity, though there's a bit of clouding, especially near the left and right sides of the screen. There's no local dimming feature to improve this.

The monitor has great accuracy before calibration. Most colors have slight inaccuracies, but the color temperature is close to ideal. Though without an sRGB mode, colors are oversaturated. Gamma doesn't follow the target very closely, so it doesn't display most scenes at their correct brightness as they're either too bright or too dark.

The accuracy after calibration is superb, and doing so fixes most inaccuracies. The color temperature is almost perfect, and gamma follows the curve extremely well.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic. The monitor has near-perfect coverage of the commonly used sRGB color space. However, it has more limited coverage of the Adobe RGB color space with undersaturated green and cyan.

The HDR color gamut is mediocre. It doesn't display the wide range of colors needed for HDR content, though, and it has some tone mapping issues.

The HDR color volume is mediocre. It doesn't display bright and dark colors well.

The text clarity is okay. With ClearType on (top photo), the diagonal lines appear bolder. These photos are in Windows 10.

The reflection handling is decent. While it struggles with glare from strong light sources, like opposite a bright window, it overcomes glare in most dim rooms.

The gradient handling is fantastic. There's slight banding in darker shades of green, red, and gray, but it's hardly noticeable.

The motion handling is disappointing across the VRR range. There's noticeable smearing and blur, and there's more inverse ghosting at lower refresh rates. Although the 'Faster' overdrive setting is the best at high refresh rates, the 'Fast' setting is more consistent across the VRR range. The other settings have such high CAD that it passes the limits of the chart, and you can see an alternative chart here.

The refresh rate compliance is poor. Its response time isn't fast enough to make full color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame, leading to blurry motion.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 165Hz is disappointing. There's noticeable blur and smearing, even with the 'Faster' overdrive setting. The other settings have less inverse ghosting than 'Faster,' but they have more blur.

The CAD at 120Hz is disappointing. Like at the max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive is 'Faster' as it has less blur than the other settings, but it still has smearing and inverse ghosting.

The CAD at 60Hz is poor. The 'Fast' overdrive has noticeable smearing and inverse ghosting. You can use 'Normal' if the inverse ghosting bothers you, but it has more blur.

This monitor supports backlight strobing to reduce persistence blur. However, it's very limited as it doesn't work at the same time as VRR, and you can only enable it at 165Hz or 120Hz. It also causes image duplication.

This monitor has distracting VRR flicker with changing frame rates. It's most noticeable in dark scenes, which is disappointing for gaming, but you can reduce this either by setting a frame rate cap or disabling VRR.

The backlight remains flicker-free at all brightness levels, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker.

The input lag is low, so you won't notice any delay and get a responsive feel.

The monitor works well with the PS5, but without HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, it can't take full advantage of the console with VRR or 4k @ 120Hz signals.

The monitor works well with the Xbox Series X|S. It can downscale a 4k signal from the console, which is useful because the console only supports HDR with 4k signals.

Unfortunately, there are some issues when using this monitor with macOS. The VRR feature flickers both in-game and on the desktop when the frame rate drops below 60 fps, and HDR doesn't work. When using a MacBook, windows return to their original position when waking the laptop up from sleep, though not when reopening the lid.

The LG UltraGear 32GN650 has a few extra features, including:

• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair for FPS games.
• On-Screen Display Lock: Locks the on-screen display settings.
• Black Stabilizer: Increases the gamma in dark scenes to make details more visible.
• Dynamic Contrast Ratio: Adjusts the brightness of the screen automatically.
• Reader Mode: Reduces blue light emissions to reduce eye strain.