KTC H32S17 Review – CHEAP 32” 1440p 180Hz Curved Gaming Monitor

Especially in this frankly awful market it’s completely understandable to be looking to save money at every turn, and this KTC H32S17 looks like a perfect way to do that. A truly premium spec list, but for budget prices? What’s not to love? This looks mighty tempting, on paper, but it’s always wise to look at what you actually get before clicking that add-to-cart button. That’s what this video is for. We’re going to look beyond the impressive specs – 32 inch, 1440p, 180 hertz – and see exactly what you get. We’ll test the response times, latency, colour and brightness, and by the end you should have a much better idea of this thing’s merits and if it’s a paper prince, or a true diamond in the rough. 

The obvious pro here is the value proposition – £170 for a 32 inch 1440p 180 hertz curved gaming monitor – sure sounds amazing! It’s a decent bit cheaper than AOC and LG’s comparable options, which makes it mighty tempting. That’s the on-paper part. Now for the real stuff. Straight out the box you’ll notice how cheap this feels. I mean it’s hard to make an entire large gaming monitor for £170, let alone a great one, so I definitely give that one a pass. The stand is tilt only – no height, swivel or rotation adjustment – although you can VESA mount the thing if you’d rather. Interestingly the IO is remarkably full. It has two HDMI 2.0 ports (which means poor compatibility with consoles) and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports, along with a tiny external power brick. The on screen menu is also pretty mid, controlled with a joystick style switch on the back. You do have a handful of overdrive modes though – we’ll get to those – along with the option to ‘overclock’ the panel. Overclocking, in this context, means going from 180 hertz, to the astonishing, mind-boggling… 185 hertz. Yeah, not exactly game changing, but it’s there if you want it. As for styling, this is pretty basic. It has a few red accents in otherwise cheap feeling dark plastic, although at least the base of the stand is metal.

Taking a closer look at the panel, the curved VA panel mind you, it looks nice enough. Fairly bright, decently vibrant, and compared to an IPS panel certainly less grey. However it doesn’t exactly pop, and at 32 inches 1440p can look a little… ‘unsharp’. It certainly isn’t quite as crisp as a 27 inch 1440p panel, although it’s hardly awful. To put some numbers to those words, at full brightness you’ll get 325 nits, and almost a 7000:1 contrast ratio. That’s incredible, especially as most VA panels are generally in the 3000-4000:1 range. As for colour, you get 89 percent coverage of the DCI P3 space, or 64 percent of Rec2020, which isn’t terrible, but far from the best I’ve seen. Accuracy though is a little poor. While the average DeltaE of 2.56 is decent, it clearly isn’t factory calibrated, and unlike similar AOC options, it doesn’t come with a calibration report in the box. To the eye this looks nice. It doesn’t pop as well as an OLED does, but at least for content consumption I’d argue it’s a cut above an IPS panel for sure. The only thing I’d note is that thanks to the pretty intense curve, any light coming from the sides or behind you WILL find it’s way to your eyes and be annoying, where a flat panel might be more forgiving.

The ugliest part of this thing though is absolutely its response times. VA panels aren’t known for their speed, especially in darker shades, but this one is somewhat impressive in its poor tuning. With overdrive off we get to see that panel’s native performance, and at 7 milliseconds we’re actually pretty close to the 180 hertz refresh rate window at around 140 hertz equivalent. With overdrive set to “Standard”, the default mode, that average improves to 4.4 milliseconds, or nearly 230 hertz, so we’re well above the refresh rate window on average now, although still only two thirds of the results are within the refresh rate window, and we’re already seeing some overshoot. If you’re thinking of turning it up to “Advanced” to get some more snappiness out of it… don’t. The overshoot is horrific, bringing the average perceived response time back to nearly 6 milliseconds on average (although the initial does come down to a little under 3 milliseconds). Oh, and if you think “Ultra Fast” will be any better… hahahahahahahaha no. 

Just so you can visualise this, here is high speed footage of this thing on “Standard” – the out-of-the-box setting. It’s ok, but there’s definitely some ghosting, and there’s a couple of weird overshoot moments too. This is usable, but not amazing. Then there’s “Advanced”, which is already awful. The overshoot here is obvious – in fact it was obvious to me from just moving a window around – although beyond the inverse ghosting we have at least removed the regular (less obvious and annoying) ghosting. And then there’s the dumpster fire that is “Ultra Fast”. The overshoot here LASTS LONGER THAN THE FRAME TIME! Seriously, it is atrocious. If you get one of these monitors, leave it on standard. Sure, it’s sluggish, but at least it isn’t painful to use.

As for actually gaming on it, well that’s a mixed bag. While it is just above fast enough to game on, it’s hardly the crispest experience I’ve had – both in motion and in resolution. It’s good, but not great. For your average gamer – especially if racing or story-driven games are more your thing – it’s fine. It’s adequate. But it’s far from your next pro esports display. The thing is though, I suspect those options from AOC or LG would be somewhat similar – sure, they’d have better overdrive tuning and might come factory colour calibrated, but the real-world playing experience would likely be similar. 

So saving £20-£30 is worth it then? Well probably not. Not because the overall experience won’t be roughly the same, but because you’ll get better quality, possibly a better outright panel and maybe even a longer lifespan. I don’t think 10 percent less cash is a worthwhile tradeoff for outright quality. To be clear, this H32S17 isn’t a bad monitor, and if you end up with one, especially for more like £150, I wouldn’t be mad about that. But I don’t know I’d go out of my way to get one, at least at this close a price tag to the rest. There is also the more general view on curved VA monitors, which aren’t exactly my favourite, but I’ll leave that one up to you.