Refine search for TVs

  Leave a comment      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

On top of all this, you can also choose between eight different colours and finishes (Ebony, Rosewood, Light Oak, High Gloss Black, Metallised Chrome, Aluminium Silver, and Ruby) for the inlay panels down the TV's sides, and choose from a whole host of TV mounting options, including our personal favourites; a pole mount that runs all the way from floor to ceiling, and a square silver post that plays host to a centre speaker.

All of this hard-to-deliver flexibility already goes some considerable way to explaining the Compose 40's cost - as well as justifying the Individual part of its name, of course. Please bear in mind, though, that many of the setup options we've just discussed actually add further to the £3,000 cost - that's certainly not an ‘all-inclusive' figure.

If you're looking for more justification of the Compose 40's price, how about this: a built-in 160GB hard disc recording system.

This little beauty can record Freeview channels from one of the two provided Freeview tuners; from the analogue tuner; and from sources taken in through the SCARTs provided there's no protection by the Macrovision anti-piracy system. What's more, you can use the Freeview EPG to set recordings for the HDD, or the Teletext system to set analogue recordings in the unlikely event that you'll ever have to make any of those.

There are limits to what the HDD system - dubbed DR+ - can do. It can't record HD, inevitably, and it doesn't have enough functionality to meet with the new ‘Freeview Playback' criteria just established by Freeview and about to debut on new TVs from LG. But it's still a mighty neat feature to have built into your TV all the same. Especially when that TV looks so svelte and sleek that it's hard to believe there's room for any functionality beyond the simple mechanics required to make a picture.

Yet more evidence that Loewe is going for broke with this TV is its full HD native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, making it a potentially perfect fit with the vast majority of the UK's high definition sources.

Driving the full HD panel, meanwhile, is the latest incarnation of Loewe's likeable Image+ picture processing system. While not apparently as powerful or sophisticated as Panasonic's V-Real 2 or Philips' new Perfect Pixel Engine processing systems, Image+ nonetheless tackles the key essentials we'd expect of any such system, namely: colour tone and saturation, contrast range, fine detailing, and motion handling.

Add your comment