Terratec Cinergy 250 USB review

Terratec, better known for its sound cards, also makes TV tuners, such as the analogue Terratec Cinergy 250 USB.

A small external box with an aerial connection and S-video input, it plugs into a spare USB port. This makes installation simple, as there's no need to pull your PC apart to install an expansion card.

The software installation was nice and simple too. However, once we installed it, things started to go downhill. The Cinergy TV software isn't very good and isn't fully integrated with the remote control. For example, there was no way to use the remote control to tune the TV.

Instead, we had to use the mouse to delve through the program's options. When we found the auto tune it took around five minutes to scan. Once that was done, we then had to manually select which channels we wanted to keep by putting them in a favourites list.

Once everything was working we weren't impressed with the quality. The picture suffered from coloured bands striped across the whole display. This was much worse than on other products we've tested.

One decent feature is the multi-channel preview, which shows what's on each channel using thumbnails. However, we couldn't select the thumbnail of the channel we wanted to watch using the remote control and had to revert to the mouse again. It's also annoying that this feature is a separate application, so it takes a while to switch between TV and preview modes.

TV can be displayed full-screen or in a window. There's a button on the remote to switch between modes, which works, except the onscreen display shows a message in German.

While the remote has a Time Shift button labelled, in practice we couldn't get it to do anything. Pressing it just popped up a menu that had no reference to time shifting. The manual doesn't mention this function either and there is no online help.

Recording is another missed opportunity. The Cinergy 250 doesn't have MPEG2 encoding hardware, so you're left with software encoding. You have a choice of codecs to use and you can download and install new ones such as DivX. This codec will help keep file sizes down but it will put a higher demand on your processor.

Our biggest problem with recording is that there's no Electronic Programming Guide (EPG). Instead you have to use the TerraTec Scheduler. It's programmed like a regular video, so you need to dig out a paper TV guide.

Finally, the product comes with Cyberlink's PowerDVD. It's not enough to make up for the clunky interface and poor quality, though. We'd suggest that you spend your money elsewhere.