Terratec Cinergy HT Express review

USB TV tuners can now be bought for less than £25.

They may be small, but they still protrude messily from your notebook and take up a USB port. However, most new notebooks now have fast ExpressCard expansion slots, and this is the first ExpressCard TV tuner we've seen to take advantage of these.

The card uses the ExpressCard/34 standard, which is the slimmer of the two types, so it will fit in to any ExpressCard slot. It isn't thick enough to accomodate a full-sized RF input, but an adaptor is included for using a standard aerial lead.

The mini antenna plugs directly into the card, and comes with both magnetic and suction-cup bases. However, like all portable antennas, you'll need to be near a transmitter to get a watchable picture from it, otherwise you're likely to see a fuzzy or blocky image.

The tuner can receive both analogue and DVB-T broadcasts, and picture quality was good on both, with little noise on analogue and few picture artefacts when using the digital tuner. We had trouble with the supplied version of Terratec's Home Cinema software when switching between analogue and digital broadcasts. We recommend downloading the latest version for free from the firm's website.

The interface is easy to use, though, and menus are largely self-explanatory. The EPG doesn't have our preferred timeline layout, as used by Windows Media Center, and instead shows the information from one channel at a time. You can schedule recordings from the EPG, though, and it marks them for future reference. A free one-year subscription to TVTV is provided, worth £15. This excellent online EPG provides newspaper-style listings and lets you schedule recordings from your browser, wherever you happen to be.

Our only real complaint about the Cinergy HT Express is the price. It's considerably more expensive than similar USB hybrid tuners, and it doesn't come with a remote control. It's worth buying only if you're desperately short of USB ports. If you only want digital TV reception, you should seriously consider the dual-tuner Cinergy DT USB XS Diversity instead.