Kiss Coolview 17WS Review

Overall Rating

-Very nice look and form factor,
-Multistandard TV tuner built in (PAL/SECAM B/G, I, D/K, L).
-Fair TV picture quality.
-Wall mount possibility with the built-in foot.
-12V battery supply possibilty ? (separate power supply)

-Very unsatisfactory management of TV picture formats (incorrect letterbox handling)
-Unsatisfactory management of TV standards (country based)
-No stereo decoder
-No teletext decoder (thus no format detection)
-No SCART (thus no RGB for a set-top box)
-Non standard PC resolution (1280 x 768, due to 15/9 screen aspect ratio)
-Quality of the LCD backlighting ? (non uniform black background)
-User guide not corresponding to the product : NTSC only guide even for PAL/SECAM products sold in Europe.

In the store in Paris, which had no antenna signal,I was very skeptical if I could use the Kiss Coolview 17WS LCD TFT Monitors TV tuner in France since the user guide (in english only) in the box of the EU model corresponds to the US model and mentions only NTSC-M for the TV standard (US, Japan, Korea).
There is no EU version of the user guide either on the web site of Kiss (there are English, French and Spanish versions, all three for the NTSC model).
However the vendor ensured that it was covering PAL and SECAM, and this proved to be true ... The european product in fact covers almost all world TV standards ... except NTSC-M !
Back home, I found the TV menu not intuitive at all, since the horizontal arrows and the central buttons do not act as you would expect, but this is a minor problem.
What is really more troublesome is the way the TV standards are handled, which shows that the software is a very quick adaption of the monostandard, channel oriented software of the US model: once you have chosen a country, you can only receive the TV standard of this country (you have to go in the menu and change the country if you want to receive another standard, and you lose all your preselections). This is not acceptable in border regions where you can receive off air transmissions of 2 or 3 different standards or even if you have an appliance with a modulator of a different standard than the country you are in (very common in France).
But what is worse is the very bad management of the TV picture formats. Firstly, you can only modify the format from the menu, despite that there are two buttons on the remote for a "zoom" function of very little use. Despite the many options available in the picture format menu, it is impossible to display correctly "letterboxed" films in full screen without a either distorsion or a wrong aspect ratio. You can display correctly 4/3 pictures with the "fill aspect ratio" option, you can fill the screen with a distorted 4/3 picture (panorama) with the "wide" option, you can also display correctly trues 16/9 pictures from DVD or STB with the "normal" option. But when it comes to a letterboxed film (as used by most analog TV broadcasts), there is no option available for an undistorted full screen display, neither from the format menu nor from the zoom. The "anamorphic" option (which probably was intended for this case) does exactly the opposite of what it should by compressing the picture vertically instead of expanding it. This does not correspond to any input format for a TV picture, and is probably a bug in the software ...
There is no SCART (only Cvbs and S-video inputs), which prevents the connection of a Canal+ analog descrambler and also to connect a set-top box or DVD player in RGB mode, but you can see this before you buy the set.
There is no stereo decoder (this is much less obvious from the outside).
No teletext decoder either, therefore no automatic format detection.

The monitor I bought had a strange problem only after 24 hours (a kind of solarization effect on TV as well as PC pictures), and it was exchanged without difficulty by the store where I bought it.
But back home, I realized that this second set had a non uniform "black" background when viewing dark pictures in a dim ambient light.
This is probably due to a "leakage" of the backlight from one corner of the screen...

So I bought this product because of its very nice look, its multistandard TV tuner and the good name of Kiss, but I was very disappointed by the TV functionality mainly due to a very poor TV control software which clearly indicates a total lack of knowledge of the European requirements (TV standards and picture formats).
The product is made in Korea, which can explain partly this situation, but it is unacceptable that a reputable european company (Kiss is based in Denmark) accepts this behaviour for a set to be delivered in Europe.
The fact not to have a proper user manual corresponding to the version sold in Europe is also very symptomatic of a quality control which leaves much to be desired.

Members' Comments onmarceljack's Review

• iansviews on 3rd Jul 2004

  I cannot agree with this review, taking into consideration the cost of the product and the facilities that it offers one would be hard prest to find anything up to the picture quality offered at this price or indeed at £100 more in cost.
  The sound quality is excellent and it does not take long to work out how to accurately set the controls to produce excellent quality images.
  What do people want for their money these days!

• marceljack on 21st Jul 2004

  Feedback from Kiss Hotline (very responsive):
  -They do not contest any of the critics of my review,
  -However they cannot do anything to improve or correct the product because the development of this product is finished ...
  I leave this answer to your own judgement.

• marceljack on 15th Oct 2004

  Kiss indicated me the name of the korean producer of this monitor. The company is named Cynos and their web site is www.digitalcynos.co.kr.
  They sell exactly the same product (NTSC model) under their name in Korea where you can find it at 580000 won (approx 400 Euros).
  From the user manual which I downloaded, it appears that it handles the TV formats correctly (two letterbox modes) and it has additionally a close captioning decoder (subtitles) and an audio equalizer (bass/treble/balance control).
  I wrote Cynos an email about 10 days ago with my complaints about the TV format handling and got no reply so far.