With Pioneer bowing out of the high-end TV market, could it be Loewe's turn to fill the premium space left behind? Well, the German brand's latest slimmed-down LCD set, the Art 42 SL, is certainly a step in the right direction.

The Art 42 SL is bang up to date technology-wise, and can be accompanied by luxuries like an internal hard drive recorder and an all-aluminium 5.1 sound system.

And with those sleek lines – this is Loewe's thinnest telly yet, with a 90mm depth – it might just have the X factor needed to claim that difficult high ground.

The Loewe system, as assembled here, flaunts a price tag that could push an Icelandic bank over the edge, but it can be broken down to more manageable components if you prefer. The new Art TV is available on its own, and without the HDD recorder or stand, for £2,345.

The Individual Sound package can be purchased separately and even bundled with one of Loewe's Individual TVs as originally intended. The fabulous aluminium stand certainly adds panache to the overall look, but it also bumps up the price by £440.

You can even specify what kind of tuner and hard drive modules you'd like slotted into the panel – an HDTV tuner perhaps, with a 250GB hard drive? No problem: Loewe likes to think of its TVs as luxury cars and nothing is impossible when it comes to the optional extras. At times, this is baffling, but the proposition is nothing if not versatile.

So how well does this good-looking system come together? Has it been assembled using unremarkable components? Is it ultimately a question of style over substance? Well, when it comes to the screen, it's safe to say that Loewe isn't simply dressing up a budget off-the-shelf LCD panel in fancy togs.

Part-owned by Sharp, the LCD panel used here is almost certainly sourced from the Japanese brand. It's a decent looking 1080p screen with a 100Hz refresh rate, 24p compatibility and Loewe's own picture-enhancing video processing inside.

The set comes with a basic Freeview tuner as standard. Another module contains the DR+ hard drive that enables the TV to perform tricks like pausing live TV and recording up to 200 hours of video.

Other functionality includes USB sockets and a photo-sensing cell that can measure the ambient light, and dim the screen accordingly to save energy.

Connectivity includes three HDMI inputs, component, RGB Scart and a common interface slot.

Of course, it also looks nice and fancy. A lustrous high gloss black finish is one option, but in my opinion the all-chrome version pictured here is a little bit more striking.

Blu-ray me

The TV at the heart of this system is a rather mixed bag. Subjectively it achieves a generally high standard with both standard-def and Full HD images, but our Tech labs team were less impressed with its objective performance.

To access its hi-def credentials, I used a Panasonic DMP-BD35 player as a source, but the company does make its own BluTech machine if you wanted to keep to all-Loewe badges.

I ran a variety of material, from X-Men: The Last Stand through to Twilight on BD. I noted a wide colour range with vivid reds and suitably natural fleshtones.

Loewe has included some very active video processing, similar in many ways to Philips' Pixel Plus system, to spice-up the picture even further. But with Blu-ray, the Fine Quality Improvement, as it's labelled here, is quite unnecessary – I found it gave Twilight an unrealistic halo of distortion around the edges of solid objects.