The device itself is silver and rather small and can fit comfortably onto your hand, or more likely, the TV. It has 5 connectors on the back - power, RF in, RF out, and 2 SCART sockets for the TV and VCR. The front of the device includes a simple black display with a single, solitary LED that blinks RED or GREEN depending if the device is on standby or operating.
In the package comes a remote control (with batteries), and is about as simple as a digital box needs.
Set up is quick and painless - it includes a SCART cable and an RF lead so you can add it to your existing setup. Once connected and operating, it automatically prompts to do a scan to find all available channels, both TV and radio. In our case, it found a number of BBC Radio and TV channels, but not the 30 typically broadcast due to lack of freeview in our area. This meant we were left with only a couple TV channels - Parliament and CBeebies. No BBC Three or even the standard BBC One and BBC Two.
The box is simple enough to use - the menu's are clear with big text, but none-too-pretty looking compared to other offerings from more mainstream manufacturers. However, they do the job. Unfortunately the product's main problem in this department is response. It takes several seconds for the device to respond to even the simplest of commands like 'turn off' or 'advance a channel'. This makes browsing very labourious, slow and irritating. Once on your chosen channel, the system works well, with good, clear picture and decent sound. TeleText works as one would expect.
The device comes with a simple folded-A4 manual which is pretty ignorable. I could have written a better manual 5 minutes of opening the box.
There is one interesting issue with the device that we have discovered, but unsure quite why it occurs. Apparently it can only find 2 TV channels - BBC Parliament and CBeebies. However, when hitting the menu button, just before showing the menu - for a split second - it shows us BBC News 24 and BBC Three in two separate boxes on the left side of the screen. We have no idea how it achieves this, or why it won't let us watch them normally. It's like a tease! We have yet to determine if this is intended behaviour or not (maybe due to poor signal), but it is certainly very odd.
So, overall, a simple no-frills little box that apparently gets the job done in a very cheap manner. However, it does feel tacky and appears to want to regulate what we watch!
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