In general, the background light that is produced during the reset period deteriorates the dark room contrast ratio in AC PDP. In this paper, we propose a modified ramp reset pulse that can reduce the background light to an imperceptible level. In the new reset waveform, the discharges between the scan and sustain electrodes are minimized by applying a positive bias voltage to the sustain electrode and only the weak discharges between the scan and address electrodes are found to occur during the reset period. We also adopted the MgO coated phosphor layer to improve the address voltage margin that was reduced when the bias voltage in the modified ramp reset waveform was applied. As a result, the address voltage margin of 45 V which is the same level of the conventional method was ortained and the dark room contrast ratio was improved up to 7500 : 1.