Evesham TV-930 portable LCD television review

18 May 2007 11:00 GMT / By Davey Winder

This small, 240 x 172 x 33mm with a visible display area of 199 x 119mm, 16:9 ratio LCD television weighs in at less than 1kg making it truly portable unlike most portable tellies.

Although we will come back to the question of real world portability in a moment. First, let’s look at what you get in the box. As well as a dinky adjustable stand, which can be a tad fiddly to fix together, there’s a credit card remote control, a couple of power adaptors (auto switching mains and a 12v DC in-car jobbie), a set of headphones, a couple of phono audio cables and a mini VGA USB cable.

Picture quality is pretty good, thanks in no small measure to the high brightness and contrast of the display. Or rather we should say that picture quality is pretty good when you can get a picture, which in our case meant when we were indoors close to a proper aerial cable.

And by proper we mean one that is attached to a big shiny thing mounted to a chimney rather than a Heath-Robinson coat hanger affair or, woe betide, the supplied portable antenna which proved as much use as a one legged man in an arse kicking competition [apologies for those who are entering a one legged arse kicking competition shortly - Ed].

Which brings us nicely to the first of our complaints about the TV-930, as a truly portable television for use on the move it just doesn’t make the grade.

OK, so our reviewer lives the rural dream in Yorkshire, but even when he drove into the relatively big smoke of Sheffield was unable to get an acceptable signal from the portable antenna. This isn’t a problem that the TV-930 suffers from in isolation, but we have seen other solutions that fare better.

Indeed, in general the whole portable TV genre has come a long way since the days of those awful transistor radio-alike pocket affairs that provided a matchbox sized screen and poor signal reception. And that’s the problem for the TV-930, it has to compete with USB memory stick sized devices that plug into your notebook PC and provide just as portable a solution with a bigger screen size for half the money.

Where the TV-930 does score is when you want to use it as a portable second TV around the house or office, which could prove difficult with a laptop-based option if someone wanted to send some email or do a bit of serious online fragging.

The tiny footprint means it will fit just about anywhere, be that the kitchen or the bedroom, and is stylish enough not to look out of place either.

It also works well in the car, courtesy of the supplied 12V cigarette lighter adapter, but not as a TV because of that mobile signal problem. Nope, in the car the AV output comes into its own for use with a portable DVD player, games console or even a video camera for that matter.

Oh, and the integrated mono speakers cope well with all these tasks, and there’s a headphone socket for when you don’t want your driving distracted by the sounds of Sonic the Hedgehog.

But the TV-930 is as much about what is missing as what is included, and that means no digital freeview tuner just a plain old fashioned analogue terrestrial one which kind of limits its life span considering the big digital switchover that is fast approaching.

And that brings us back to those notebook based TV tuners, which now are available in full digital supporting glory, and cost a lot less than the Evesham hardware.

If you have a laptop these are the obvious way to go for portable TV, if you don’t then we are still hard pressed to recommend the TV-930 because it’s useful life is so limited courtesy of that analogue tuner.

Verdict

Small but sadly not perfectly formed, lacking the real world functionality we would expect in this digital television age and at a price point that makes it a difficult sell because of it.