Elonex Lumina review

Features
The Lumina's thin body hides a full-sized PC, but despite space constraints it's still a reasonably fast machine. The 3GHz P4 is a swift processor and Elonex has coupled this to a Radeon 9600 AGP graphics card -- a powerful enough combination to handle basic video-editing tasks and the less demanding of today's games. Since you're likely to be using the Lumina as a PVR and not a gaming machine, this is not an overwhelming disappointment. If you are a keen gamer, your best bet is to connect a PlayStation or Xbox to the Lumina.

The 200GB hard disk and the Elonex's base configuration of 1Gb of RAM will be up to most tasks, including video editing. You can store untold volumes of recorded TV on the Lumina, and 1Gb of RAM will fare well at general Photoshop work.

Setting up and recording television is identical to the procedure you'd use on any other Media Center PC. Once we’d plugged in an aerial, the on-board tuner scanned for available channels and automatically assigned these to presets.

The Lumina's 32-inch LCD is deliciously bright and crisp. As with all LCDs, there are compression artefacts visible when viewing digital television. If you're familiar with JPEG compression, you'll have seen this kind of distortion before around the edges of a low-resolution photograph when you zoom in on it. The artefacts look like small, mottled, discoloured areas around high-detail elements of the picture. From a distance it's acceptable, but up close, you'll be reaching for the sick bag.

Unfortunately these artefacts are simply a result of digital television's disappointing resolution on any large television. When high-definition television is adopted on a wider scale, you'll find that the image quality of compatible digital TVs increases to a point where you can take advantage of these huge LCD screens. For now though, most LCDs simply expose how poor the digital TV signal really is. It's entirely tolerable from a few metres away, but it's only when playing DVDs that you'll get to really show off what the Lumina is capable of. It's important to note that although the Lumina can play a high-definition DivX or Windows Media video, it's not a true HDTV. To qualify as an HDTV, a television must have a DVI or HDMI input; the Lumina has neither.

Performance
Amazingly for a Media Center PC, the Lumina didn't give us any installation headaches. We're more used to Media Centers behaving like a primary school bully -- beating us into a sorry pulp in an attempt to hide their own horrible inadequacies. The Lumina, on the other hand, was charming and hospitable.

This ease-of-use has a lot to do with its built-in screen: most Media Centers need a good thrashing before they'll submit, but this monitor is already hardwired to the computer, so we didn't have to blindfold it and put a gag in its CD tray before the thing would agree to display a picture.

Elonex has opted for Microsoft's Windows XP Media Edition. This has a glitzy, spectacular feel to it. Menus float around the screen with dreamlike fluidity. There's enough animation to make a Pixar employee vibrate with glee and the PVR interface is especially easy to use. One click on a TV programme in the on-screen schedule records that programme once; two clicks and every episode of that programme will be recorded until the end of time.

If you're desperate to use a Media Center PC in your home, but you don't hold a PhD in molecular physics, the Lumina represents your best shot at getting one of these machines to cooperate.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide