Attaching storage also let you time-shift and record TV. If you plug in an external hard drive or flash drive you can display JPEG photos and play MP3 files, although they are loaded slowly. The highest supported resolution is 1080i, which is also the highest resolution used for digital TV broadcasts in Australia. Picture and audio quality from the Kogan HD Digital Set-Top-Box with PVR are perfectly acceptable for digital television broadcasts. Three built-in games available from the PVR's menu - Othello, Tetris and Sudoku - allow you to pass the time during ad breaks, but won't hold your attention for long due to high remote control latency making gameplay frustrating.
The Kogan HD Digital Set-Top-Box with PVR has a rudimentary electronic program guide, although the low-resolution interface doesn’t allow a great deal of information to be displayed. A comprehensive scan for channels took a little longer than five minutes, and the set-top box successfully found all digital television channels in our area. The menu is relatively easy to understand, and the lag between pressing a button and the interface responding is bearable. A low-resolution white-on-blue GUI is rather ugly, but it is easy to see from across the room. The interface of the Kogan HD Digital Set-Top-Box with PVR isn’t exactly colourful or lush, but we weren’t expecting much from a $99 system. There is a coaxial digital output, but no optical audio output means so the Kogan PVR is a bad choice if you’re connecting an external home theatre audio system without a coaxial connector. The rear of the digital set-top box has a range of video and audio outputs we used the HDMI output to connect the Kogan HD Digital Set-Top-Box with PVR to a Tyagi Max19 LCD television, but analog inputs for connecting older devices are also available (composite and component connectors). There's also a front-mounted USB port that lets you plug in external storage for recording TV shows and time-shifting (pausing, rewinding and fast forwarding TV broadcasts). The Kogan HD Digital Set-Top-Box with PVR isn't physically impressive - it’s a squat, grey box with an old-school LCD screen on the front.
At under $100 this set-top box represents great value for anyone wanting to upgrade to digital television. You can also plug in an external hard drive or flash drive to record TV shows. The Kogan HD Digital Set-Top-Box with PVR lets you watch high-definition digital television on a non-digital TV.
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