Elonex Lumina

It may look like a high-end TV, but the Lumina is a PC at heart. At the rear of the 40in TFT panel is a 3GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM, a 400GB hard drive and ATI Radeon 9600 graphics. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 enables you to watch and record TV, listen to music, and browse photos on a PC via an easy-to-use interface. Elonex ships a TV tuner that can be used either as an analogue or digital model, but you can’t use both as the same time – so you can’t watch one channel while recording another.

Given the cost, we expected the Lumina’s screen to be of a high standard and we weren’t disappointed. A range of inputs enable you to use the screen as a standard TV without launching the PC. However compression on digital Freeview broadcasts resulted in noticeable artifacts not usually apparent on smaller screens. This improves when playing high-definition content from the hard disk, and the few dropped frames were probably the result of the modest CPU.

The extensive range of ports doesn’t include a DVI or High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connector, so it’s not compatible with forthcoming HD broadcasts from Sky. And the integrated speakers were unforgivably quiet.

It’s hard to recommend the Lumina, which is a shame, as it is the most stylish Media Center PC we’ve reviewed. But, given its price and the lack of an HDMI connector, we’d advise you to wait for an updated model.

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