LG Display is one of the most impactful pioneers of consumer OLEDs, bringing unmatched picture contrast to the masses with some of the first TVs equipped with the technology. In the monitor scene, LG is also known for some of the most premium options for both gamers and content creators. Just last year, the company released its first OLED gaming monitor, and now LG is ready to take it one step further with its new 32-inch 4K OLED, with a name that rolls right off the tongue: the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE.

Although we have many more OLEDs to choose from nowadays, it’s always intriguing to see what one of the original players has been cooking up. The LG 32GS95UE is the company’s latest and greatest, and it’s clearly priced to be an entire step up over its first attempt. In fact, its MSRP is even higher than all of its direct competitors, so LG needs some pretty good reasons to justify its asking price.

Let's also keep in mind that not all OLEDs are equal. LG is using what is traditionally considered “older” OLED tech, using W-OLED instead of QD-OLED. Currently, most competing OLED monitors make use of the latter. But given LG’s track record, sticking to W-OLED makes some sense: it’s the company’s battle-tested tech which it’s nurtured and improved over the years. To this day, W-OLED is still adorned on their highest-end TVs, and there are enthusiasts who still swear that its picture quality exceeds that of QD-OLED. But can the 32GS95UE inspire this same sentiment in the field of computer monitors today?

About this review: The monitor tested in this review was loaned to us by LG. The company had no involvement in the contents of this review. Testing was conducted on firmware version 3.04.

Price, specs, and availability

The LG 32GS95UE is unique, as it’s currently the first and only 4K 32-inch W-OLED monitor among several QD-OLEDs — at least for a few more months. In the US, the 32GS95UE can be had for $1399, and it’s currently the most expensive 4K 32-inch OLED on the market here. But like many of LG’s monitors, you can expect to see some pretty hefty discounts from time to time.

LG tries to set itself apart with two key features: a “Dual Mode” button that switches the display from 240 Hz at 4K, into a 480 Hz at 1080p mode; and “Pixel Sound,” created by front-facing speakers that emit from within the panel itself.

LG also offers a two-year warranty for parts and labor, but does not officially state if it covers burn-in, which is our primary concern.

Ports and connectivity

Just the basics

The LG 32GS95UE is pretty barebones when it comes to available ports. It has two HDMI 2.1 ports and a single DisplayPort 1.4a, lacking the higher throughput of DisplayPort 2.1. This means that the monitor will require Display Stream Compression (DSC) to drive it at the maximum resolution and refresh rate. But even when using HDMI 2.1 and 4K 120 Hz, the monitor will still engage DSC even though it doesn’t require it.

Besides the video ports, the monitor also provides two USB-A 3.0 for peripherals, and one USB-B for software control and firmware updates. It’s pretty disappointing not to see any Type-C ports on a monitor in this price range, which would be much more useful since they could also be used for power delivery in addition to display connection. There is also no physical KVM switch, but LG does offer a software solution that works over your local network.

As a side note, this monitor comes with an external power supply, making its cable management more bulky on a desk. Many other recent monitors I’ve tested have the power supply built into the panel housing, so I’m going to have to ding LG for the mild inconvenience.

Design and impressions

One of the best-looking and pragmatic gaming monitors

At first glance, the LG 32GS95UE does not seem to have the appearance of a gaming monitor at all. From its base and stand, up to its monitor housing, it’s all more subdued than your usual gamer aesthetic. It's very much to my taste, as the minimalist design is one of my favorite aspects of this monitor.

The bezels are mostly symmetrical and lack any obtrusive branding. The base “feet” take up very little horizontal room, and despite being plastic, the monitor has an almost metallic look to it. On the rear, there is some subtle “UltraGear” branding on the stand and an illuminable logo on the top monitor housing. There are also active fans within the monitor, but from my testing I’ve never heard them.

For ergonomics, the 32GS95UE is also quite versatile: it has a large height adjustment range, the usual tilt & swivel, and can even be pivoted to full portrait orientation. Just to note for those with a shallow desk, the front of the panel does protrude about 7 inches from the very back of the base.

Pragmatics also extend to the screen coating used for this monitor as well. The 32GS95UE comes with a matte finish, which diffuses incident reflections over the surface of the screen. This comes at the cost of adding a slight texture to solid white surfaces on the screen, which makes the coating a strong point of contention among display enthusiasts. Conversely, a glossy coating would have an unfiltered appearance at the risk of more intrusive reflections.

Many will swear by glossy coatings for pure screen quality when in-room lighting can be controlled. But if you primarily use your PC during the day, or with the lights turned on, then a matte effect can present a cleaner picture, especially with the improved coating on the LG 32GS95UE.

The coating on the 32GS95UE is the cleanest matte finish I’ve seen on a computer monitor

In my experience, the coating on the 32GS95UE is the cleanest matte finish I’ve seen on a computer monitor. The texture is much less severe than your typical matte finish, and from my usage it’s been mostly imperceptible. The grain becomes less prominent the greater your distance from the monitor, and the larger 32-inch size typically places it at a distance where it shouldn’t be a problem. In my setup, my eyeballs are about 30 inches from the front of the screen. If you peep forward, it’s definitely there, so, just — don’t.

On the topic of reflections, one of the main advantages of W-OLED over QD-OLED is its ability to maintain deeper black levels when in a lit room. It’s not always practical or feasible to work or play in complete darkness, which is needed for QD-OLEDs to have comparable black levels; even dim overhead lighting is enough to give off grayish blacks. In my everyday use, the LG 32GS95UE simply shows superior image contrast (on right) compared to its QD-OLED competitors (on left), and it’s this monitor’s stand-out advantage.

Text rendering shows vast improvements on current OLEDs when upgrading to 4K. For this monitor, LG also adjusted its subpixel layout from RWBG to RGWB, changing the underlying order from RBG to RGB. This might not seem like a big deal, but it can help things look sharper since the subpixel sampling on most applications (if used) assumes a striped RGB subpixel layout. On Windows for example, the ClearType system font renderer subsamples RGB by default, so OS text should look much clearer on this monitor.

Compared to other 4K QD-OLED monitors, I prefer the overall text I’m seeing on this W-OLED. Although I feel that text generally does appear sharper on the QD-OLEDs, I can perceive color fringing for light-on-dark text on those panels due to their subpixel layout. For the W-OLED RGWB layout, text can sometimes look a bit fuzzier, but I’ve had zero issues with color fringing, which to me is a worse offense.

Screen uniformity is one area where W-OLEDs are typically at a disadvantage. With darker surfaces, such as in dark-themed applications, vertical streaks and hatches can often be seen across the OLED. For the first several days of owning the monitor, it can look much more severe, but with each subsequent pixel cleaning it does appear to soften up. On our particular unit however, there is also a dark spot near the top-right of the display. The photo above exaggerates the appearance since it’s been significantly brightened, but with normal content and use, the issue isn’t as obvious.

Menu and features

On the bottom rear of the monitor is the usual two-axis joystick which grants access and navigation to the on-screen display (OSD) menu. Two menu shortcuts can also be assigned to either a flick to the left or right, which can be handy if you want to quickly enable the FPS counter, for example.

One stand-out feature of LG’s OnScreen Control software is that it allows you to change some menu settings without the need for a USB connection. Firmware updates, though, will still require two cable connections, which is also facilitated through the OnScreen Control software.

Color tuning

By default, the monitor will be set to the “Gamer 1” picture preset for both SDR and HDR. For color tuning, the OSD offers adjustments for Brightness, Contrast, Sharpness, Gamma, Color Temperature, and Hue/Saturation for RGB. In the Game Adjustments, LG also lets you adjust the Black Stabilizer to tune near-black colors. These are all nice to have and more than you’d usually see on a monitor, but I’d like to have seen multi-point grayscale adjustments for color calibrationists.

In the sRGB picture preset, the settings for Sharpness, Gamma, Color Temperature, Hue/Saturation, and Black Stabilizer are all disabled, which is disappointing for those who want finer control over the pre-calibrated mode. Although the Color Temperature presets are disabled, the screen white balance can still be tuned via R/G/B adjustments.

When in HDR, Contrast, Gamma, and R/G/B White Balance are disabled. Color temperature can still be adjusted between the Warm/Medium/Cool presets, but it cannot be manually tuned via RGB adjustments.

Dual Mode: 480 Hz / 1080p

The headlining feature of this monitor is its coveted Dual Mode. With a press of a switch below the panel, the screen will reconfigure itself for a 480 Hz refresh rate and 1080p resolution. For most gamers, the native 240 Hz at 4K should be more than enough motion clarity. But for ultra-competitive players who want a slight edge, the Dual Mode outputs the cleanest and most responsive experience you can get today.

Cursor tracking unmistakably feels more strongly coupled to every micro-movement

There aren’t any games I regularly play that can make use of the 480 Hz, but it did poke at my itch to boot up Counter-Strike for the first time in a while. I was skeptical, but cursor tracking unmistakably feels more strongly coupled to every micro-movement, starting and stopping on a dime. But in a slower-paced game like Counter-Strike, the tradeoff can feel like a bit of a wash, and 240 Hz feels adequate. Still, I don't feel like the Dual Mode is a gimmick at all, and I would certainly prefer to play games at this refresh rate if they could support it.

Visual clarity takes a nosedive at 1080p, but this isn’t too big of an issue for esport titles that don’t demand the greatest graphical fidelity. Besides, given the size of the monitor, you’ll probably want to move it farther back for a more focused field of view, which also further reduces the perceived loss of resolution.

Since 1080p divides wholly into 4K, we should expect the 1080p Dual Mode to perform, at worst, like a 32-inch 1080p monitor. That is to say: not very sharp at all, but free from needless sample aliasing. The most primitive form of upscaling in this case would be to simply repeat each pixel four times in 2×2 chunks, since 4K is four times the resolution of 1080p. This is often called integer scaling, or similarly nearest-neighbor scaling.

By taking close-up photos of the monitor, we find that the 32GS95UE doesn’t appear to be using pure integer scaling. Although the logical pixel mapping is very similar to integer scaling, there is some smoothing along the horizontal axis, most visible on the “A” in the photo above. Overall, the Dual Mode’s appearance makes for a good compromise between sharpness and smoothness, and I prefer it over pure integer scaling.

If you can’t push the monitor back, the 480 Hz Dual Mode also lets you emulate a 27” or a 24” screen with black insets. In my opinion, these can look considerably worse than running fullscreen, since the viewport resolution is no longer an integer factor of the render resolution. Text can seem jagged and broken enough to be detrimental to HUDs, so I would try to avoid using these windowed modes.

Pixel Sound

If you don’t own a pair of decent bookshelf speakers, or if you’re just after a cleaner desk setup, the LG 32GS95UE has some relatively decent built-in speakers — for a monitor, that is.

Behind the display are two 10-watt actuators which produce sound by vibrating the glass. They’re not going to output any fulfilling amount of bass, and it starts to sound really wonky below 120 Hz, but the mids and treble offer detailed and distortion-free near-field volumes. They also come with DTS surround-sound virtualization enabled out the box, but for my taste, it sounds better with this disabled. If you can afford the space, investing in a set of bookshelves for a tenth of the price of this monitor will sound substantially superior.

Variable refresh rate (VRR)

As usual with any modern gaming monitor, the 32GS95UE comes ready with adaptive sync technology. This feature improves frame pacing and reduces input lag when paired with V-Sync, which is needed to completely prevent screen tearing. The monitor is officially validated with both FreeSync Premium Pro and NVIDIA G-SYNC Compatible, and I’ve had no abnormalities with it in my setup.

On OLEDs, however, the luminance of each pixel varies with the time needed to drive them, which depends on the refresh rate. If the refresh rate of the display is constantly fluctuating, then a fluctuation in pixel luminance may also be observed. This is sometimes referred to as “VRR flicker” and it’s most noticeable in darker scenes. Larger changes in refresh rate produce larger changes in luminance, so it’s important that your graphics settings can maintain your desired frame rate. This can be unavoidable in some unoptimized titles, so it may be beneficial to blacklist these games from triggering VRR in your GPU control panel.

From my testing, the VRR flicker on the 32GS95UE is no better or worse than other OLED monitors I’ve tested. Above about 150 Hz, frame rate fluctuations of about 30 fps are enough to produce a noticeable change in near-blacks. In the chart above, a luminance error of about 3.0 can be noticed in average viewing conditions. Fluctuations below 150 fps (but above the minimum VRR range of 48 fps) are much harder to notice, so depending on the game and your hardware, a frame rate cap of 150 Hz may be optimal.

OLED protection

With OLED, each pixel is its own emissive source, and they all individually degrade over time. When some pixels degrade more than others, permanent burn-in can occur, creating a non-uniform display surface. Thankfully, there are tricks display makers use to try to prevent burn-in from occurring prematurely.

The primary method of maintenance is through OLED Image Cleaning, which tries to compensate for short-term pixel degradation. This occurs after four hours of cumulative screen use, and happens automatically the next time the monitor goes on standby. Before starting, a notice will pop up to let you know it’s about to occur. The process takes up to ten minutes, and can be canceled early by waking the monitor, in which case it will retry next standby. After resuming, there will be another pop-up letting you know if the image cleaning has completed or not.

Another common method is through pixel shifting, which occasionally moves the screen over one pixel to diffuse pixel wear. There are supplementary pixels surrounding the screen to enhance this feature, ensuring that pixels on the edge are never pushed off-screen. OLED Screen Move is disabled by default on this monitor, which is surprising since it’s enabled out of the box for every other OLED monitor I’ve tested, along with LG’s own OLED TVs. Nevertheless, I recommend enabling this feature to help extend the longevity of this heaping pile of organic material.

Two other active safety measures that aren’t listed in the settings are Convex Power Control (CPC) and Logo Extraction Algorithm (LEA). CPC is essentially a vignetting around the screen, which is meant to help reduce power consumption and the risk of image retention, while LEA detects static elements like logos and reduces their luminance. The CPC vignetting can often be strongly apparent, making UI elements and HUDs appear dimmer. I would love to see LG give us the option to disable this (without needing to access the service menu) as it often has an impact on content fidelity.

Display brightness

Satisfactory SDR with very competitive HDR highlights

On the spec sheet, the LG 32GS95UE is rated up to 275 nits in SDR and 1300 nits in HDR. With OLEDs though, the actual screen brightness can be dimmer than expected depending on the content. To conserve power, OLEDs may start limiting their total luminance when too many bright pixels are being shown — a mechanism often called automatic brightness limiter (ABL). Because of this, going by a single brightness measurement from the spec sheet doesn’t always tell the full story.

In SDR, the 32GS95UE has consistent brightness with no tomfoolery going on. When set to maximum display brightness, the luminance for white measured about 285 nits, marginally surpassing its reported 275 nits. Out of the box, the default brightness of the display measures about 200 nits, typical for an office setting. In my opinion, this should be perfectly adequate for almost any indoor setting as long as direct sunlight isn’t hitting the screen.

If you want the screen to be even brighter, you can enable “Peak Brightness” to “Low” or “High.” When set to “High,” the 32GS95UE can produce up to 460 nits, or about 360 nits when set to “Low.” But to reach these greater brightness levels, the OLED will only be able to for a limited portion of the screen. At “Low” it can maintain its peak when the screen is emitting less than 25% of its maximum output before dimming; on “High” it’ll do 460 nits below 12.5% of max.

HDR10

When displaying HDR content, the monitor can reach much greater peaks for small specular highlights. Since HDR10 works in absolute units of luminance, it’s also helpful to report the source luminance levels for which it reaches its peak brightness.

At its default setting, Peak Brightness Low, we measured the 32GS95UE to reach up to 640 nits. It can maintain this total luminance when the source's average luminance is below 75 nits. When scenes get brighter than this, the overall brightness will gradually drop, down to a minimum luminance of 280 nits for a full screen of peak white.

When "Peak Brightness" is "High," we measured a maximum luminance of 1247, slightly shy of the theoretical 1300 nits. Although this seems much greater than 640 nits, the ABL in this mode is also much stronger, which you can observe in our chart measurements above. For example, a well-lit scene that averages about 50 nits will have dimmed the screen by 40%. Overall, the punchiness of HDR is greater in this mode, but the oscillations in content brightness can be bothersome.

When compared to current QD-OLED monitors, the 32GS95UE has brighter whites as well as having more relaxed ABL. In its respective Peak Brightness Low mode, current QD-OLED monitors output up to 450 nits, and begin dimming when the content's average luminance exceeds 45 nits. For Peak Brightness High, it outputs 1000 nits and begins dimming past an average content luminance of 30 nits. But when it comes to the brightness of color, things are a little different, which we'll soon get to.

Color performance: SDR

Excellent vibrancy and contrast, with okay accuracy

In the default “Gamer 1” preset, the 32GS95UE makes use of its entire color gamut, which can look oversaturated if you’re after accurate colors. Its OLED covers nearly the entire P3 gamut (98.5%), which is still the boundary for most HDR films and games today.

Out of the box, the monitor uses a standard 2.2 gamma curve, which is what most computer monitors have used for the past two decades. In the menu settings, the tone curve can be changed to Gamma 2.0 (Mode 1), Gamma 2.4 (Mode 3), or sRGB IEC (Mode 4). The default white balance is on the warmer side, measuring about 6000K.

For more accurate colors, LG provides a dedicated “sRGB” preset. This mode clamps on-screen colors to the sRGB gamut, which is the standard color gamut of the internet and almost all SDR content. It also sets the display brightness to output approximately 120 nits for white, which is common for color proofing.

But in terms of calibration performance, it isn’t as accurate as it could be, averaging a ΔEITP color error of 6.2 and a maximum error of 19 (where lower values are better). Colors are still a bit oversaturated, with blue mixtures having the largest differences. For tonal contrast, the 2.2 gamma target measures closer to 2.26 due to slightly steeper mid-tones. An ideal monitor for color-sensitive work would have an average color error below 3.0 and a max error below 8.0, such as achieved by LG’s competition, the Dell AW3225QF QD-OLED.

The correlated color temperature for the grayscale in the sRGB preset averages about 6484K, which is very close to the D65 target of 6504K. Despite this, the grayscale measures a consistent shift towards magenta, whereas the other color presets and color temperature settings do not. This makes it seem like an intentional choice, and it could be explained by metamerism failure. The gist is that the white balance on OLEDs typically appear more yellowish-green compared to an LCD that’s calibrated to the same exact white point; it’s possible that this shift we’re measuring is compensating for this visual effect.

This monitor also supports manual hardware calibration via LG Calibration Studio, which requires you to own a colorimeter to measure the display. Unfortunately, for some reason I could not get the application working on my setup to test out its functionality for this review.

Near-blacks and color banding can also be weak points for this monitor, especially when running at 240 Hz. Faster refresh rates give the pixels less time to light up, often causing near-black colors to clip to black. On our unit, the first five 8-bit steps out of black are almost completely crushed, losing out on a bit of shadow detail. Past that, near-blacks also appear significantly warmer than the rest of the grayscale, creating a discontinuity in both luminance and grayscale tint. Again, not super obvious in most content, but it’s worth knowing that it can be present in darker scenes.

Color Performance: HDR

Great tonal reproduction with weak color luminance

In HDR, the color pallet becomes much larger and the mathematical relationship between color mixtures is more complex. This increases the difficulty of precise calibration. Further, since a large portion of the peak brightness of a W-OLED comes from its dedicated white subpixel, highly saturated colors may not be able to get as bright as expected.

Almost all colors that aren’t white measure about 33% dimmer than intended

To reach the brightness levels needed for impactful HDR, W-OLEDs take advantage of their white subpixel for much of its luminance. But contrary to popular belief, W-OLEDs do not mix in any more white than necessary, which would reduce color saturation. Instead, very bright saturated colors maintain their normal chromaticity but at a lower intensity than intended. Then, because of the Hunt effect, the same color shown at a lower brightness is perceived as less colorful.

With all that in mind, let’s get into some measurements:

In its default “Gamer 1” preset, the LG 32GS95UE does a great job tracking the HDR10 ST.2084 tone curve. This is the base curve necessary for accurate contrast and color representation. The white balance is also very close to our D65 target without the magenta tint observed in the SDR sRGB preset. But for very dark shades, we see the same strong deviation towards the warm side as in SDR.

HDR colors are decent in terms of chromaticity, but almost all colors that aren’t white measure about 33% dimmer than intended. This occurs regardless of the target luminance of the color, and it happens because of the way the Peak Brightness algorithm works on these monitors. Here, the brightness boost only affects the white subpixel and not the red/green/blue emitters. This is disappointing to see, as LG’s newer OLED TVs do not suffer to the same extent. Those sets apply a color boosting algorithm so that color luminance doesn’t become an issue until near the peak brightness of the display. But for this monitor, all colors are affected.

The problem gets even worse when Peak Brightness is set to High. The white subpixel is now proportionally much brighter than red/green/blue, and colors are now about half their intended brightness. The EOTF tone tracking is also problematic in this setting, as it doesn’t have its own dedicated calibration; it still uses the Peak Brightness Low curve, just doubled in white brightness. This also means the monitor still only reports a max input luminance of 600 nits, so the higher brightness doesn’t actually contribute any more highlight detail than the “Low” setting. The setting also has much greater ABL, which we covered in the Brightness section.

Near-black tones are too dark in HDR as well, similar to SDR. Slight color banding and a loss of detail can be noticed in dark scenes as a result of both the lower luminance and warmer tint. Transitions between color and grayscale can also produce contouring in HDR due to the Peak Brightness algorithm only affecting white.

Calibration drift

One last thing you might want to know about this OLED is that it suffers from calibration drift, which is common for OLEDs. What this means is that the display might look a little different depending on if you’ve just turned it on or if you’ve been using it for an hour. As the panel heats up, the pixels gradually become brighter, most noticeably in dark tones. For this review, all my measurements were taken after at least 30 minutes of warm-up, which was enough time for the picture to stabilize. When the monitor is first turned on after a while, the screen initially under-tracks its target, but stabilizes toward the correct calibration. The Alienware and MSI QD-OLEDs I’ve reviewed also suffer the same issue, except those panels boot up first with the desired calibration, then stabilize towards a more washed-out picture.

Should you buy the LG 32GS95UE?

Buy the LG 32GS95UE over the competition if:

• You want a bright, sharp OLED monitor with the deepest contrast, even with the lights on
• You play competitive games that can benefit from the ultra-smooth 480 Hz
• You want a high-end OLED monitor with decent speakers

Do NOT buy the LG 32GS95UE if:

• You want the best HDR experience you can get on a monitor
• You want an OLED that comes with a very accurate sRGB mode

Compared to the QD-OLED competition, the LG 32GS95UE has some distinctive characteristics that make it a great choice for some. Certainly, its star advantage is its 480 Hz dual mode, which I can totally understand the appeal for competitive players. The motion in this mode is absolutely mesmerizing just to play around with, and it's the closest thing I've seen to life-like fluidity on a screen.

In terms of picture quality, the image contrast of this monitor will be superior to QD-OLED in most rooms. Side-by-side with QD-OLED, I strongly prefer the picture on the LG 32GS95UE in SDR. But in HDR content, things switch around, with colors appearing much more vibrant and correct on QD-OLED. You'll need to choose depending on your priority of content, and it sucks that each tech currently suffers from serious drawbacks.

Despite its imperfections, for my usual setting, the 32GS95UE is really the best-looking monitor in terms of general aesthetics and SDR picture quality. It's easy on the eyes, both in and out of use. Overall, the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE is a fantastic monitor that I can recommend, but I don't think it's worth paying more than the competition for unless you particularly require its feature set.