KTC H27P22S gaming monitor review: No-frills 4K IPS in 27 inches for under $399

The monitor, the two-part stand (base plate and stand), a power supply unit, a leaflet mimicking the user guide, and an HDMI cable are packed in large packaging with lots of polystyrene and plastic.

As is typical for KTC, the assembly is relatively simple and does not require any extra screws: First, the base plate must be placed on the stand and the connection tightened using the integrated wing screw. Then connect the stand to the VESA connection on the back of the monitor using the clamp connection - that's it. Now you can lift the monitor out of its packaging and set it up.

The exterior of the KTC H27P22s is clearly defined by black plastic on all sides.

The plastic border of the panel is very thin, but as usual the glass panel itself still has an approx. 6 mm wide border on all sides. Only the small KTC logo is emblazoned in white at the bottom edge of the front of the screen, and there is a small blue LED at the bottom right which indicates whether the monitor is switched on. However, it can also be deactivated in the OSD. The joystick for operating the OSD is located directly behind the front LED on the back.

The black back is curved and has a long indentation in the shape of a "W" in the upper third. The side slits suggest the existence of loudspeakers, but these are probably just air grilles, as the H27P22s does not have loudspeakers despite claims to the contrary on some third-party websites. The connections face downwards and are located in the lower third of the rear. There is a recess in the stand for cable routing.

To ensure the necessary load-bearing capacity, only the stand is made of metal, but it is also covered in black plastic. It allows the monitor to be adjusted in various ways. The stand can be rotated in the base plate so that the monitor can be rotated sideways. The stand itself has two rail slots halfway up, on which the screen can be pushed up and down, i.e. adjusted in height. The VESA suspension of the stand is almost designed as a kind of gimbal and allows limited tilting and tilting of the monitor, the latter up to 90 degrees so that the screen can also be used in portrait mode.

The inexpensive monitor does not have a KVM switch. Otherwise, all important connections are available and well-positioned. In one line we have two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort as well as a headphone output. The USB-A 2.0 port is only used for update purposes.

As usual with KTC, there is no fiddly operation with various buttons. Instead, a single control element is used - a small joystick. Although this is concealed from the front on the back, you don't have to feel it for long, as it is located directly at the height of or behind the status LED. It could be a little quieter when pressed, so it doesn't make an overly high impression, but it has good feedback and does what it should.

Incidentally, the OSD can be positioned anywhere on the screen. It is displayed centrally by default, but we have moved it to the bottom left-hand corner, for example.

Pressing the stick calls up the OSD menu. Alternatively, you can press the stick in one direction to take shortcuts to certain settings such as Input (top), Brightness (bottom), Presets (right), and Game Assist (left, show crosshairs, etc.).

The menu is clearly structured and the operation with the stick is very simple: press right to confirm and left to go back. Pressing the stick closes the menu.

The only really annoying thing is that KTC always displays a warning when selecting certain functions, some of which are elementary, such as brightness, that adjusting the respective option could increase screen consumption. Always having to click away or confirm the message could often elicit an annoyed roll of the eyes from the user (source: self-test).

The screen offers a multi-stage overdrive mode to achieve even faster response times for gamers. The images above show the normal response times with deactivated overdrive (Off). Especially with the gray-to-gray response times, you can see in the images below how the overdrive works from Standard to Advanced to Ultra Fast.

The G2G response times can be reduced from 11.8 to 6.8 to 5.2 and finally to 3.6. However, there is hardly any positive effect on the black-to-black times.

KTC states that sRGB is fully reproduced and DCI-P3 is still reproduced to 97.5 percent. We can confirm the former, with regard to DCI-P3 coverage we measured "only" around 87 percent.

Like the previous models, our current test device is unfortunately not calibrated at the factory, and the DeltaE values for both grayscale and color are well above 4. Our own calibration reduces both deviations even further, especially the grayscale deviations, which are even below 1. The color deviations of 2.57 are not quite as low as we had hoped, but the value is okay.

At the default setting of 90 percent brightness, the screen consumes a fairly constant 43 W. If the brightness is maximized, just under 47 W is drawn from the small 65 W power supply unit. At a brightness of 50 percent, we measured just under 32 W.

The cable leading from the power supply unit to the monitor is a little short for our taste, which means that the power supply unit mostly hangs in the air instead of lying on the floor to relieve the cable.