Humax LGB-32TPVR review

Features
With the LGB-32TPVR, Humax has created a template for the TV of the future, and the sheer number of features beats the current crop of TVs hands down. True, media centre PCs such as the Elonex Lumina have packed PVR functionality into an LCD TV before, but it's obvious that the media centre is a much less attractive idea than Sky+. While not quite as powerful, the recording features of Humax's TV are the equivalent of Sky+ for Freeview, allowing you to set recordings from the electronic programme guide and watch one channel while recording another.

There is a spanner in the works for this potentially world-beating feature though. The Freeview tuners and the hard drive seem to have been linked together in an incredibly haphazard manner, with low-quality video links somewhere along the line (see Performance, below).

Still, at least there are some benefits from the digital integration. There's two tuners, so you can record one channel while watching another, and you can back your recordings up to an external drive via USB 2.0. You can also pause and rewind live TV thanks to the hard drive's buffer, which lasts up to 30 minutes. Scheduling recordings is an absolute cinch, as you can simply reserve programmes from the EPG up to seven days in advance. You can also record analogue TV if you're unlucky enough to live in a non-Freeview area.

Performance
Humax's picture quality is passable on Freeview -- the picture is washed out and the colours are flat, but there's only a small amount of smearing and it's stable during fast motion. Step up to a progressive-scan DVD player and the colours become more vibrant and the outlines sharpen up for more detail. There's a noticeable lack of contrast across all sources, however, and the picture never looks anywhere near as alive as an LCD from Panasonic or Sony.

The real letdown is that recordings are massively inferior to the original broadcast -- it's almost as if there were a VHS tape deck in the back instead of a hard drive. True, there are different recording levels that you can set, with HQ, SP and LP levels offering 11 hours, 21 hours and 31 hours respectively. But even the HQ level is vastly inferior to the digital broadcast, and since it allows you to fit only 11 hours of recordings on the 40GB drive, you can record just five films at the most. If you buy a standalone Freeview recorder, even one of Humax's, recordings will be indistinguishable from the original broadcasts, so this cost-cutting exercise seems ridiculous.

Audio reproduction on the Humax is good, with plenty of vocal detail, even if the 14W overall power is underwhelming. There's also SRS TruSurround XT for a more spatial soundstage, and you can output any audio source to a surround-sound system via the television's digital optical output.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide