Cinergy 1400 DVB-T
Buy Now...
Unlike the other Terratec products that I have looked at, the Cinergy 1400 DVB-T is an internal PCI device rather than the USB variety. While this does mean that you will have to open up your system box to insert the card, the product does promise digital television and radio reception plus features that include time-shifting, MPEG-2 recording, teletext and EPG (Electronic Program Guide) facility.
Opening the product box reveals the small PCI card; remote control with an Infrared extension lead to help provide line-of-sight; and a couple of CDs. You might wonder, at this point, where you might find the set-up or getting started instructions. Unfortunately Terratec seems to feel that this type of assistance is unnecessary for its product. Instead the company relies on PDF files located on one of the CDs and a card that concentrates more on features than what to do. This is, I feel a big mistake and hope that Terratec will quickly reconsider this approach.
The PCI card needs to be in position before moving on to the installation of the provided drivers and accompanying software. Inserting the card can be rather fiddly due to various protruding connection ports on the cards back-plate. Some manoeuvring will be required in order to fit the card but should be within most peoples skill set. Connections are available for an aerial (preferably of the roof-top type), external output monitor, camcorder input, and the previously mentioned Infrared extension lead.
When you first run the Cinergy software you will be presented with a viewer window and console panel. Initially the viewer will be blank and will remain so until a scanning procedure has been completed. Scanning has to be manually activated by selecting the appropriate option revealed after clicking on the cog-wheel icon positioned in the lower right corner of the console panel.
While the scanning process is rather slow, it should have been relatively straightforward but it did not turn out that way. In my case it was like a war of attrition as I had to run the process several times, saving any channels found after each attempt, before a reasonable number were identified. On one particular scan it found the same six channels 12 times which hardly filled me with confidence. Even after running the scan on numerous occasions, the best the software could come up with was 25 television and nine radio channels hardly a full complement of free-to-air offerings currently available.
The console panel provides one route to the various options available. Another method is to right-click on the viewer and then select from the context menu that appears. You can cycle through or select your channel of choice; bring up the EPG feature which shows a weeks program details for the current channel; capture a screenshot; toggle between full screen and window view; switch to teletext; and activate time-shift. Most of these features worked fine and produced good results but there were a couple of exceptions.
First I was unable to access teletext on any channel. An area would be blanked out but no text would appear. What was even more worrying was the number of times that a no signal message would be displayed following a switch of channels. Once this message appeared it was impossible to view any channel including the one you had been watching prior to making the change. The only way out of this impasse was to select another channel, close down and then restart the program.
While the quality of reception received was generally good, the various problems encountered weigh too heavily against this product. I could live without teletext but having to restart the program on a fairly regular basis was too great a frustration for me. Even with the bundled copy of Uleads DVD MovieFactory 3, Cinergy 1400 DVB-T will not form part of my home entertainment set up.
The Cinergy 1400 DVB-T product requires a 1.5 GHz Intel Pentium with 512MB of RAM, DirectX 9 and Windows XP. The product has been priced at £79.99.
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