Like its Korean compatriots, LG and Samsung, Hyundai is still producing both plasma and liquid crystal screens, and this LCD TV is part of its Vvuon series.

Although the VVUON Q400's list price sounds rather high, it does include some novel extra features that you'll do well to find on rival offerings.

Chief among these is a separate digital recorder that's being bundled with the screen. Worth around £130 when bought on its own, the HDR-350Q boasts an impressive 500GB of storage, which should be more than enough for even the most obsessive video archivist.

Design disaster

Despite being fairly light considering its size, the Q400 isn't part of the new slim range of LCDs that are currently all the rage, and is also blighted by one of the oddest desktop stands we've seen.

The regular oval, gloss black foot is book-ended on both sides by two, apparently functionless, grey plastic objects that resemble ashtrays. The end result is a design disaster.

Fully connected LCD

On a more positive note, the Q400 is, without doubt, one of the best connected TVs around.

There's a veritable banquet of video ports on its rear including a pair of component video inputs, a fully-wired Scart and, unusually, a composite video output, alongside optical and electrical digital audio outputs, a line-level subwoofer phono and a PC port.

Despite this almost total connectivity, there is just a single HDMI input to make use of the Q400's 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution.There's also no CI slot, so subscription services cannot be added to its built-in digital TV tuner.

Pause live TV

Also equipped with an HDMI output and able to handle anything up to 1080i, the bundled HDR-350Q recorder is able to record footage direct from a camcorder as well as from a VCR.

The deck also enables you to pause live TV and even record TV programmes to transfer to a PC in MPEG format.

It's fitted with an equally impressive roster of connections that include a wired LAN port for connecting to a network, a couple of Scarts, component video outputs and other ports for composite video (in and out) and USB (host and for connecting to a PC). Not forgetting both electrical and optical digital audio outputs.

Confusing to use

A remote control that is packed out with keys and a very basic graphical user interface are unforgivable at this price.