For office work the pixel pitch and font size is identical to a 24” 1080p resolution display which is comfortable and easy to use, without being to large that it loses clarity. It might not look quite as sharp as a 27” 1440p display, but it’s perfectly usable and many people may even prefer it. Movies and HDR This 31.5 inch 165 hertz edge lit VA panel has a matte non-reflective surface with a 1 millisecond response time, 5 gray to gray, HDR10 handling (ha!) and 10 bit color, which is likely 8-bit plus FRC as LG would likely advertise this as a native 10 bit panel if it was. Contrast is over 3200 to 1 versus the listed 3000 to 1, and the max power draw is 63 watts. So TLDR, the LG 32GN600-B is a flat 1440p VA 165 Hertz panel, having excellent low input lag, and 1 millisecond response with 5 Gray to Gray. The SDR colors are outstanding out of the box, and perfect after calibration. Supporting FreeSync Premium and working with G-Sync over DisplayPort only, the menu is snappy, and the 8 mm pixel to air is pretty good. For gaming, the Response Time or Overdrive setting of Faster does best at 165Hz, and Normal does best at 60 Hertz. So the LG 32GN600-B is a great gaming monitor. It has good color accuracy and the picture quality is also good, and with low input lag and 165 hertz refresh, it’s suitable for professional gamers, even though you may get some blurriness or artifacts in transitions to and from dark scenes. We tried it a bit with PS4 Pro at 4K and that looked good, and it should work equally well with newer Xbox and PS5. And for camera usage, the LG 32GN600-B does accept 4K at 24 frames, popping up a dialog to tell you about the resolution mismatch which we really appreciate. This is great for reviewing footage in an emergency, we tested this with a Lumix G9.

The 32GN600 is aimed at gaming and so we put it through its paces with our usual range of tests. First of all, we wanted to establish which was the optimal overdrive mode (‘Response Time’ setting in the OSD). Pursuit camera photos capturing perceived motion clarity in the Faster and Fast response time modes at 165Hz refresh rateThe net result of this is that the improvements you get normally in motion clarity from that extra 45Hz refresh rate are basically wiped out by the slower response times and their failure to keep up. We have captured some pursuit camera photos which show that actually the 120Hz mode probably looks a bit better overall in practice as there is none of this added smearing because the response times can’t keep up with the frame rate. This is kinda like getting to drive a sports car, you’re all excited about trying it out, you open the door and have to sit on a milk crate and that’s your experience. We re-calibrated on PS4 three times, getting the same result each time. Usually with HDR, there’s that “ooooh” when it looks good, but HDR has really poor color volume here from the incomplete DCI-P3 and Rec. 2020 color gamuts. So, don’t buy this for HDR. This is a bit of a shame as it means you can’t really make the most of the full 165Hz refresh rate. Although for games consoles those will be maxed out at 120Hz anyway, and many systems might struggle to output >120Hz at the 1440p resolution as well. It’s just a better experience and overall motion clarity at up to 120Hz we found with the panel not really being fast enough to push beyond that. ‘ Fast’ Response Time Mode

Furthermore, the model up from this, the LG 32GP850-B you’d figure with its Nano IPS panel would deliver a much improved HDR experience, except the panel hits 430 cd/m2 across the board, and a competing VA panel, can hit 450, delivering a far more competent HDR experience and brightness, and matching this model’s price. The market is seeing a real push in this space for 32” 1440p displays and they are winning us over we have to say. The text and font size are still perfectly comfortable to use and sharp even at this larger screen size for general and office uses, and certainly no issue for gaming and multimedia. At the maximum refresh rate of the screen we will also include our familiar more detailed response time measurements, which includes a wider range of transition measurements as well as some analysis of things like the refresh rate compliance. This identifies how many of the measured pixel transitions were fast enough to keep up with the frame rate of the screen. Ideally you’d want pixel response times to be consistently and reliably shorter than this refresh rate cycle, otherwise if they are slower it can lead to additional smearing and blurring on moving content. We measured an 94.5% sRGB coverage which was pretty good, although we were a little disappointed to see it couldn’t quite cover the full space in this day and age. There is a bit of under-coverage in blue shades but it’s not major. There is also a small amount of over-coverage in green shades but again only minor, giving rise to that 97.8% relative coverage figure. The result of all this is that we had a good colour accuracy out of the box as well with an average dE of only 1.7 which was very good. There was some higher deviation in places, especially in the primary RGB shades where we had those minor differences in colour gamut under- and over-coverage mentioned before. All in all though this was a solid default setup with good gamma, colour temp, white point and colour accuracy for sRGB / SDR content. Calibration Out of the box setup was good overall. The gamma was a tad low at 2.16 average but not by anything significant. We had a very good average colour temperature across all grey shades of 6494k (0% deviance) and also an excellent white point of 6508k basically spot on with our target. There were some moderate errors in the greyscale with 2.9 average measured, but overall considering this is a fairly budget gaming screen we were impressed by the setup.

Picture Quality

Note that we turned ‘Smart Energy Saving’ mode off in the OSD before these tests so that brightness and measurements were not impacted. Everything else was at factory defaults to evaluate the out of the box performance.

We have also included some measurements using our recently updated ‘gamma corrected’ response time method, which provides measurements that are even more closely representative of perceived motion performance. These were taken at 120Hz refresh rate and in the ‘Faster’ response time mode. As we discussed earlier it is arguable that the screen looks sharper and clearer at 120Hz thanks to the better response times and better refresh rate compliance, avoiding the added smearing you get at 165Hz because the response times can’t quite keep up with the frame rate. This is probably the optimal setting to use for gaming. The results of this response time behavior though is that above about 120Hz, the G2G response times start to get a bit too slow to keep up with the frame rate demands and you start to see some additional smearing added to the moving images, especially in darker shades. At 120Hz, 83% of the measured transitions were within the refresh rate window, i.e. they were fast enough to keep up with 120 frames per second being sent to the screen. This was a good result. However, at 165Hz only 43% of the transitions were within this window (165 frames per second now) which leads to a bit of added smearing in practice. Let’s get into the LG 32GN600-B’s menus, up and down control brightness, left and right control volume for the headphone out, not for the non-existent speakers. Straight press gives you Power Off, Input, Menu and Game Mode, which gives you access to 4 out of the 7 profiles, kind of weird. Input gives an easy toggle…and Power Off works immediately for a 2-step power off. Gamut coverage – we provide measurements of the screens colour gamut relative to various reference spaces including sRGB, DCI-P3, Adobe RGB and Rec.2020. Coverage is shown in absolute numbers as well as relative, which helps identify where the coverage extends beyond a given reference space. A CIE-1976 chromaticity diagram (which provides improved accuracy compared with older CIE-1931 methods) is included which provides a visual representation of the monitors colour gamut as compared with sRGB, and if appropriate also relative to a wide gamut reference space such as DCI-P3. Calibration and profiling can of course produce excellent results if you have a suitable calibration device and appropriate software. Our results are included above. You can see the recommended OSD settings above although very few changes are needed really there, and the main corrections are taken care of at the profile level. If you want you can also try our calibrated ICC profile out. GamingThis panel’s listed brightness is 350 cd/m2, or nits, but actually delivers just 300 with SDR. This is not market standard, as you’d expect the monitor to deliver normal SDR content at the listed value. Side by side with other 350 nit monitors, this 300 won’t be quite as bright. It only hits 350 with HDR10, but the picture is darker, washed out, with only vibrant colors matching SDR levels, and bright whites hitting above SDR at 360 cd/m2. This is not a monitor for HDR. If you’re shopping for HDR, you need higher nits, and look for high DCI-P3 coverage in specs- this monitor has none listed. So to summarize, yes, the LG 32GN600-B 165Hz is a good gaming monitor with lots going for it if you never need to use HDR. If you’re doing media creation and are looking for a good affordable screen, we’ll throw the link up top right for recent monitors we’ve tested, our favorite is the Acer 4K but the Samsung 4K is likely an easier to find option. While HDR10 handling is advertised for this LG 32GN600-B, the reality is that monitors deliver SDR at the cd/m2 or nits the panel is rated for, and then boost to get the added brightness for HDR, usually by 100 nits or more. LG on the other hand, lowers overall brightness and shows full white just a bit above original brightness. This shows LG’s incompetence with HDR implementation in this monitor, so don’t buy this if one of the primary reasons is watching HDR.