Kingwin KH-300

Let’s set the scene: You just finished “acquiring” every episode of your favorite TV show, and you’re dying for an awesome way to get those files onto your slick new TV. Browsing around the web for a solution, you stumble across Kingwin’s KH-300—an external enclosure that allows you to play multimedia files on a hard drive directly to your TV. You couldn’t be happier.

Fast-forward to the climax: You’re wrong. Kingwin’s enclosure is marred by a number of flaws—from the device’s overall design, to its ugly menu system, to the absurdity of its controls. Add in its inability to play more than a few types of video media—some AVIs, MPEG, DivX, and VCDs—and you have a doorstop, not an innovation.

Putting files on the device is frustrating. For starters, you get just a drive enclosure—no drive. That wasn’t so bad, until we realized that the KH-300 works with only 2.5-inch drives, which no average computer user will ever have lying around. Transferring files is done strictly via USB 2.0, which is fine, save for the counterintuitive fact that you have to turn the device “off” for Windows to recognize it as an external drive.

Connect the device to a TV, and you’ll first get… absolutely nothing. Apparently, the enclosure is preconfigured to output video through only the VGA cable. The only mention of this in the manual is a brief head-nod to the fact that you can change the video output using the “v-mode” button on the remote control. Not. Helpful.

When the KH-300 is finally up and running, the display quality the enclosure spits out is laughable. Pictures look horrible, and the video barely passes for tolerable; the device’s audio support works quite nicely, but that’s hardly a saving grace. With so many awesome ways to get multimedia from your computer to your TV, the only amazing part of the Kingwin enclosure is that someone, somewhere actually believed it was a great idea. We’re speechless.