Plasma display panels (PDPs) suffer from motion picture distortion (MPD) since they express gray levels by a pulse width modulation technique. This paper proposes a new concept of measuring MPD for each gray level. This concept is very useful in developing methods for reducing MPD. We also present two applications of the measurement. One is the optimum selection of codewords and the other is the gray level selection method. Particularly, the latter method enables us to reduce MPD even with large motion as well as to achieve a natural gray level expression. We further extend the gray level selection method by using histogram information adaptively. Simulation results show that our measurement scheme and applications perform well.