August DA900c LCD IDTV

The August DA900c 12V portable IDTV combines a 9in widescreen LCDdisplay with built-in analogue and digital terrestrial tuners. You canalso record TV to USB drives and play media from the latter, SD cardsand memory sticks.

Resting against a detachable stand, itsblack and silver frame looks cheap close up. It's reasonably thin withoperating buttons running down both sides. A basic flat remote issupplied.

You can use the portable (with a magnetised base) or telescopic antenna provided or plug in a rooftop aerial.

Whilethe portable option suffered, the telescopic antenna provedsurprisingly effective in our third-floor Central London office,although it still managed to find only half the Freeview channelsavailable (and no analogue ones).

Freeview channels can be sorted into eight groups including news andscience or added to a favourites list. The seven-day EPG has two modes– daily and weekly. 'Daily' presents a list of upcoming programmesalongside the selected channel. 'Weekly' shows a grid of data skippableday by day but slow to populate.

You can record by pressing'record' or with the eight-event timer. But once it's recording youcan't browse the EPG or menus or play back a file.

Recordingsare in MPEG-2 format and the quality is as good as the source. But itfailed to play our MPEG-4 files and it's a shame there's no playlistoption.

The screen is poor with faint horizontal lines visibleeven from a distance and a slightly smeary looking picture regardlessof the video quality.

A single AV connector delivers visuals as soft as you'd expect from a composite connection.

Audioquality is acceptable at close range from the built-in speakers, butthe included earphones sound tinny. An ambitious product, then, butlacking in finesse where it counts.

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