The best hidden extras can also be found amid the covered remote control buttons. Pressing the G key opens up a menu of four games, including a block-moving puzzler (Egg Egg); an Othello clone (Battlesea); a timed construction puzzler (Rail Wiz); and a Bejewelled clone (Bug’s Opera). You won’t want to sit too far from the screen while playing some of these, as such behaviour is unlikely to impress the optician on your next visit. These games can also only be accessed when the drive is active, which means you’ll need to be watching a digital tuner channel.

As for the LCD screen, playback was crisp in action sequences, with a picture much better than expected from a 22-inch set. The amount of ‘noise’ – interference produced when the action moves quickly and pixels aren’t refreshed quick enough – was minimal, even in a frantic dragon chase scene from /Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire/. There was some distortion when it came to masses of blacks merging together, although this effect was only visible when sitting close to the screen and was much less noticeable from a regular viewing spot a few feet away.

One real annoyance was that the signal from a Virgin Media V+ box connected using HDMI was occasionally interrupted by a line across the middle of the image. No amount of settings changes on either bit of kit could rectify this. The same problem wasn’t replicated when connecting the V+ box to our regular Evesham HD Ready TV. Connecting the V+ box to the Humax TV using a Scart lead did manage to solve this problem, removing the annoying line but dropping us into low res. However, the PlayStation 3 console we connected to the Humax TV didn’t produce the same result going through the same HDMI connection. Pictures from Blu-ray DVDs on the PS3 were extremely clear and line free.

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