LG 32GP750-B Gaming Monitor First Impressions

For some time now, I've been thinking of replacing my Lenovo 28" monitor. I bought it at a ridiculously low price from the TSX when they were selling off excess gear so it's now more than six years old. I liked having a big monitor but as I did more with Photoshop and Lightroom, its limitations began to bother me. The final straw was when Nancy started gaming after we upgraded our PC and found that there was a lot of lag on FPS games. 

So last week we bought a new monitor, an LG 32GP750-B UltraGear 31.5" IPS gaming monitor with a 1 ms. refresh rate and a resolution of 2560 x 1440. Lag is no longer an issue.

As for using it to edit photos, it's perfectly fine. The colours are accurate (I have looked at some calibration images and they look fine) and brilliant. The monitor supports HDR, so it has excellent dynamic range. I am running it on the default settings on both the monitor and video card, and I see no reason to try an further adjustments. (I had a bad experience trying to use the Windows 11 calibration tool with the Lenovo, so I am leaving it on default settings, at least for now). 

Things I like

• The size. The extra 3.5" makes a difference.
• The increased resolution.* The Lenovo was a 4K monitor that I ran at 1920 x 1080p. I could have run it at 3840 x 2160, but I wouldn't have been able to read anything on screen. 
• The lack of lag in gaming. Nancy can get ridiculously high frame rates with no jitter when gaming.
• As mentioned above, the colours are gorgeous. 
• The matte screen has eliminated the glare problem I had on bright days. (I know some people think matte screens degrade image quality but I don't have a problem with it). 
• The joystick controls for the on-screen display are easy to use, especially compared to the Lenovo's capacitive buttons. 
• The monitor is light considering its size and was easy to set up. 

Things I don't like

• No USB ports (It has one, but it can only be used for firmware upgrades).
• No speakers. I don't need speakers in my monitor as I have a perfectly good Logitech 2.1 speaker system, but the monitor software installed a sound driver that kicked in when the monitor was turned on. It took a few minutes to figure out why we weren't getting sound and reset Windows' sound output to speakers. I've since disabled the LG sound driver as the monitor kept switching back to it when coming out of sleep mode. LG needs to fix this.
• Calibration controls are pretty basic. The Lenovo had more calibration options. Hopefully, I won't need them. 
• Despite not having speakers, the monitor must have a sound chip, because it chirps when turning on or off and when adjusting settings. It's annoying and I can't find a setting to turn it off.
• The power cord has a power brick at the plug end. I was able to rearrange the cords plugged into my power bar but this might be a problem for some users. 
• There is a very slight falloff in brightness at the left and right sides of the screen. I only notice it because I sit quite close to the screen; most people would be sitting further back, and moving back even 15 cm. makes it go away. 
• LG needs to revamp their registration process. I tried three times to register the monitor online and it failed each time. I will have to mail in the registration card.

On the whole, I'm happy with the monitor. We bought it in something of a rush because it was on sale (which was ending on the weekend) without doing a lot of research. I think we got it at a good price and I didn't want to spend more. 

* The increased resolution is a mixed blessing. Windows 11 is pretty dumb when it comes to scaling up the size of Ui elements. I can get bigger text without too many  problems, but trying to get larger dialog boxes is hit or miss. (Windows' settings warn you about trying to increase the scaling factor and they're right.) I occasionally have to resort to my reading glasses. I will have to look into this in more detail later.