Evesham T807 review

There's still a sense in which a portable flatscreen TV seems a luxury buy rather than a necessity, so hats off to Evesham for producing an ultra-portable 8in screen that weighs in on the right side of £100. But how much do you have to compromise on performance with such a tiny telly?

Connectivity is scant, as are features. An RF input, VGA PC input and headphone socket are provided, as is a 12V DC jack for the 3-pin adaptor and cigarette lighter adaptor (making this TV portable in the truest sense of the word!). Most intriguing of all is the solitary AV socket in the form of a USB connection. The T807 is supplied with a proprietary cable featuring a USB plug on one end and composite video jacks on the other, so if you intend to connect it to other equipment - like a Freeview box after the analogue switch off - you need to make sure it can somehow accept a composite signal.

Considering its diddy dimensions, the T807 delivers a surprisingly watchable picture in general. With plain old analogue broadcasts, pictures look smooth enough and colours are solid, although if you stray too far off the optimum viewing plane the picture begins to darken and any dark colours begin to lose detail and form picture holes.

With a quoted response time of 25ms we feared that fast motion, such as football match highlights on Match of the Day, might trip the T807 up. Happily this wasn't the case and pictures weren't marred by any obvious blurring or smearing.

DVD playback via the composite connection revealed some shortcomings. Some faint grainy picture noise started to creep in with our test discs, and while colours were handled well, reds sometimes had a tendency to fl are and skin tones occasionally took on a greenish tinge. Black levels didn't reach great depths either and large sections of the picture descended into black hole territory or began to grey over.

Audio can also be a sticking point. The T807 delivers mono sound and the more you increase the volume, the more thin and tinny it becomes. Plugging in a pair of portable speakers equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack will give more balanced audio but how much this issue bothers you depends on how loud you like your TV. At lower volumes it's not that big a problem.

It's worth pointing out one or two operational quirks too. When tuning in the TV, any channels not set to PAL-I lose sound, but you can manually change this. You may also fi nd that pictures viewed on the AV channels are fl ipped. Again you can change this in the menu screens by selecting picture mode 1.

As a second room TV, its price and unobtrusive size make the T807 an attractive proposition. But before you take the plunge, think carefully about what you want to use it for and consider its limited connectivity might prove problematic when the forthcoming analogue switch-off fi nally happens.