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Buyer's guide to media players
Media player news
The Escient Vision series stores movies, music and digital photos for you to enjoy from any room in your gracious house. Comprising of an all-in-one server/player, an audio/video player, and a large capacity media server, it lets you play and stream music and movies, as well as viewing music by cover, genre, title, artist, album and song. Movies can similarly be browsed by cover, title, genre, rating and/or director. You can also store and view photos in HD and create soundtracked slide shows.
Top tips
- Before you buy an upscaler, you’ll need to check two things. First, make sure it’ll enhance the picture to HD standard. Second, that your TV is actually HD-ready. If it’s not, stick with vanilla DVD.
- Invest in a PVR with two tuners. Selecting a model with a single tuner means you’ll be restricted to watching the channel that you’re recording. Dear boy… such a drag.
- A good PVR will have an Electronic Programme Guide (EPG), displaying programme info and running times. Some even let you search by keywords such as “Darts” or “Sex”, or “Sexy darts”.
- As well as harddrive recorders, you can also buy combo devices that include both an HDD and a disc burner, so you can save shows to DVD, watch them on another machine, then archive them.
Best of the rest - Hi-def players
Virgin Media V+
Free with subscription
Performance: This is an outstanding, attractive PVR, with terrific on-demand features. Lurvely.
Love: Three tuners. Excellent on-demand service.
Hate: No Sky One unfortunately. Catch-Up TV’s not quite up to scratch yet…
BT Vision
£90
Performance: With two tuners and a 160GB HDD, this lets you download movies to your hard drive.
Love: Free box and channels. HDMI output.
Hate: Paying for last week’s TV programmes…
PVRs - record everything
Topfield TF5800T
£260
Performance: This PVR lets you pause and rewind live TV and record two channels at once. If only the menu were easier to use.
Love: Excellent range of features.
Hate: High price. Menu could be improved.
Humax PVR 9200TB
£200
Performance: A quality PVR with top picture quality and the added bonus of a USB port.
Love: Works brilliantly. USB port.
Hate: Boring menu graphics.
Top up TV
£100
Performance: Using a dual-tuning Thomson box to channel Freeview and selected Top Up TV titbits, this is great for irregular viewers.
Love: Easy to set up. Decent 160GB capacity.
Hate: Doesn’t really justify £10 monthly sub.
Evesham DTR250
£170
Performance: Fitting the DTR250 with a 250GB hard drive and a sub-double-ton price tag, Evesham’s created a top budget PVR.
Love: Whopping great big hard drive.
Hate: Poor rewind feature.
HD players
Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive
£130
Performance: If you’ve already got an Xbox 360, this is the cheapest way to watch HD-DVDs.
Love: Awesome picture quality. Cheap as suet.
Hate: Unfortunately HD-DVD has lost the HD format war.
Toshiba HD-EP35
£350
Performance: With pristine pictures and lossless suround, this is the best HD-DVD deck around.
Love: Excellent picture quality. Dolby TrueHD.
Hate: HD-DVD has lost the format war.
Pioneer BDP-LX70A
£1000
Performance: Boasts HDMI 1.3, 1080p/24 images and the fi nest audio around. Oh yes.
Love: Superb build quality, images and sound.
Hate: Horribly wallet-bothering price.
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