The compact and portable Evesham TV-930 wants to be an LCD TV that's versatile enough to watch on the hop, or in the car for that matter: a good idea that Evesham hasn't nailed.
For starters, the TV-930's black, plastic shell is drab, adorned with basic operational buttons on the front. Ditto the remote control, which is one of the worst we've come across, looking like it's tumbled out of a Christmas cracker.
Taking in the connections doesn't take long, as there's just a headphone jack on the front, and composite video input at the rear for hooking up a DVD player, and a PC input (cable supplied). There's also a socket for plugging in an external aerial, which distinguishes itself as the most important connection here.
Setting the little fellow up is easy. There's a stand supplied, but no instructions on how to attach it to the TV. Luckily, it doesn't require an engineering degree to figure it out. Basic menus guide you to the auto tune facility, which takes about a minute and a half to find the five available terrestrial channels. With an external aerial plugged in, that is.
Poor showing
Using the provided telescopic aerial, trying to tune in channels (even with the auto tuner) is an exercise in frustration. Maybe it's our reception area (we tested the Evesham TV-930 in east London) but we only managed to pick up two extremely poor quality broadcasts of BBC One and Two. The fine tuning option doesn't seem to help matters either.
So, we had to resort to using an external aerial for this part of the test - thus defeating the object of an LCD that can be used in the car or on holiday. All five terrestrial channels tuned in, but pictures were still of low quality. ITV 1 was the clearest, but the picture was soft, ill-defined and noisy while Five was unwatchable.
The BBC's coverage of snooker highlighted many flaws - over-ripe colours, motion smearing and a lack of sharpness. Even twiddling with the brightness, contrast, sharpness and saturation level settings couldn't rescue the frame.
