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Looking more closely at the Sagem’s outstanding features, we find the Freeview tuner fully backed up by support for the broadcasters’ 7-day electronic programme guide. What’s more, rather excellently you can use this programme guide to set timer events for the hard disk recorder simply by selecting a desired programme from the listings.

The hard disk recorder has 80GB of storage capacity – a seriously impressive amount that should enable you to store up to 40 hours of telly at a time. Enough, in other words, to cover a couple of weeks on holiday for even the most serious telly addict.
The recordings themselves, meanwhile, are made using MPEG 2 compression at an impressively high bitrate of 15Mbit/sec. This should be enough in principle to deliver recordings that look indistinguishable from the original broadcasts. Please note, though, that the TV will only record from its two digital tuners, not from the analogue tuner or any external AV inputs.

The L26TP2 has one or two other tricks up its overloaded sleeves. For starters there’s ‘DCDi’ processing from Faroudja, a widely acclaimed processing tool that generally does a great job of removing the jaggedness that can blight contoured edges on LCD and plasma technology. Then there’s the facility to adjust the TV’s backlight, and Sagem’s own Crystal Motion processing aimed at boosting a variety of separate picture elements.

We can also confirm that this TV is fully HD Ready, adding a suitably high native resolution of 1,366 x 768 and compatibility with the necessary 720p and 1080i HD image formats to its HD connectivity.

In action the L26TP2 proves a likeable rather than inspired picture performer. Starting off with the good stuff, its colours are superbly intense, really radiating off the screen and riveting your attention on what you’re watching.

Crucially, though, this cracking vibrancy is not spoiled by much in the way of unnatural toning, as for the most part hues across the colour spectrum look entirely believable.

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