Review: Elgato EyeTV digital receiver

Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) has grown hugely in popularity since its inception, and with the UK analogue switch-off due in 2010 this is only going to increase. An alternative to upgrading your TV or buying a digital receiver, is to switch to watching digital TV on a computer.

There are many companies in this field (see our TV tuner reviews) but few with the elegance of Elgato products. Designed exclusively for Mac, the EyeTV package consists of a device little larger than a USB key, a miniature aerial, USB cable, and a CD-Rom containing the EyeTV application.

Setup is a breeze - simply plug the device directly into a USB port, attach the aerial to the device and install the software. Upon running the software for the first time you'll be guided through a quick setup procedure, which simply consists of clicking a few buttons and waiting while the software scans for all available channels.

This is such an improvement over many other devices that require you to select the location of your nearest DTT transmitter – EyeTV simply does it for you, and with good results too.

Simply moving the aerial a little resulted in a signal quality of 100 per cent, although the strongest signal we could achieve was only 42 per cent. However, this wasn't a problem as the resultant picture quality was crystal clear, which is pretty impressive as the tests were carried out in the far east of London.

Although we managed to obtain decent reception with the travel aerial, many areas of the UK struggle unless the tuner is plugged into a standard rooftop aerial.

A neat trick of EyeTV is the ability to use the remote control supplied with the Mac to change channels, alter the volume, fast-forward and rewind through programs, and pause live TV.

Recording of TV programs simply involves pressing an on-screen button, and you can select where on your hard drive to store the show. Recordings can be scheduled, and EyeTV will even startup the Mac (even when shutdown) to begin recording.

A free one-year subscription to the Tvtv digital channel guide is also included in the price of EyeTV. It might be a little more expensive than its rivals, but it looks great and, more importantly, is easy to setup and performs well.

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