Turbosat ICE TSL-17TAD IDTV

Turbosat claims this receiver is “The Ultimate 17-inch Digital TV”, and it certainly packs a lot of functionality into its small frame. 1) It’s an LCD IDTV; 2) It’s a DVD player; and 3) It’s fully Top Up TV compliant, coming bundled with a Top Up TV conditional access module (CAM), a Top Up TV smartcard to plug into it, and one month’s free access to the Top Up TV service.

The large box containing the review receiver, produced for Turbosat by Korean manufacturer Techsan, arrived unannounced, with neither instructions nor manual. Actually, as I’ve said before, that can be a good thing, since it forces you to test how user-friendly the thing is to set up. If I can do it reasonably easily without access to instructions, then the average consumer should be able to do so with little trouble, manual in hand.

On close inspection, the 17-inch LCD panel proved to have two slots, one on top of the screen (for inserting a DVD into) and one below it (for inserting the CAM). My guess on which way round to insert the CAM proved right, but I failed with the DVD, which gave rise to a few anxious moments when I couldn’t find an ‘eject’ button on the remote control (a bit of an omission, perhaps, given that a total of 61 separate buttons are packed into the keypad). Happily, the row of basic buttons below the screen display include one labelled ‘eject’, and I was able to re-insert the disc the right way round.

In the event, the rest of the set-up process did prove straightforward. My assumption that pressing the menu key on the remote would give access to the Freeview tuning function proved correct, and after a few minutes’ scanning, I had access to the full complement of Freeview and Top Up TV channels. With a brand-new box, consumers wouldn’t have to do this, since it’s supposed to scan in channels automatically once plugged in. However, mine was a review receiver that had presumably been used by someone close to a transmitter with different frequencies, so the re-scan was necessary.

My first impression was that the picture looked very clear and sharp – as, indeed, it had with the 15-inch Techsan IDTV previously reviewed on this site. The sound was a bit tinny, though – presumably a function of the small size of the integrated loudspeakers – but racking the treble down to zero and boosting bass to maximum gave reasonable results. More sophisticated adjustments are possible in DVD mode, offering ‘pseudo’ surround sound effects, and different treble/bass mixes.

I liked the way the IDTV coped with aspect ratio changes. My not-so-old Philips analogue widescreen TV performs this feat with a slight delay and an audible click. But the TSL-17TAD does it silently, and – if you’re tuning from a 4:3 channel to one showing 16:9 pictures or vice versa – fast enough for the channel immediately to appear in the correct format.

Some minor disappointments, however. In general, the MHEG engine – the software that copes with interactive functions and data – performed commendably fast, calling up the BBCi menu almost instantaneously when pressing the red button, for instance. But it suffered one or two glitches tuning into Teletext and radio channels. These trigger the interactive data function as soon as they’re called up, and in the Teletext case this took so long I gave up the first time. With a couple of the radio channels, moreover, the system simply froze – in one case with the audio on, in the other with the audio off.

Strangely, these glitches disappeared when I revisited the problematic channels, suggesting that some combination of processor and memory required two bites at the cherry. Maybe a lack of capacity also accounts for the lack of a full 7-day electronic programme guide (EPG): the TSL-17TAD only displays so-called ‘now and next’ information.

This seems curious: the whole point of offering both an analogue tuner and a digital one is to allow an analogue digital channel to be recorded while a digital one is being watched and vice-versa. Recordability has even been built into the remote control, which – lack of an eject button apart – is a fully-featured device that includes VCR controls as well as DVD ones. All of that is undermined by the lack of 7-day EPG support, in my view.

Perhaps the EPG will be upgraded in due course. The box the IDTV came in says this can be achieved via an ‘off-air’ software download – which I take to mean ‘over-the-air’ rather than with the TV switched off!

No complaints about the DVD functionality, though. DVDs really show the screen’s ability to display razor-sharp images at its best, putting many an over-compressed Freeview channel to shame. The DVD player has all the fast forward, reverse, slomo, and frame-step features one would expect in a reasonably sophisticated DVD unit, and performed flawlessly.

Conclusion: Probably not the optimal device to occupy the role of the main TV set, given its size. But it’s eminently portable (you can even hang it on the wall), sports a tiltable stand, and its smart, metallic design would make it look very much at home perched on a table, dresser or work surface in a kitchen, bedroom, bedsit or den. If you’re after a single unit to combine Freeview, Top Up TV and DVD functionality, you should certainly consider it (click here to go to the relevant bit of the Turbosat website). But have a look at what the separate components would cost you first, and then see how the Turbosat price-tag of £849.00 (inc VAT) measures up.

Specifications 

• Fully DVB-T compliant integrated Digital Terrestrial TV
• 17" TFT Widescreen LCD Screen
• Built-in DVD Player
• 12V DC powered with universal mains adapter
• UHF Loop out connector for VCR or TV
• Single SCART supporting composite video and S-Video
• Stereo, Mono, Dual and Joint stereo audio modes
• CD Quality Audio
• Integrated Stereo Speakers
• Headphone socket
• Favorite channel facilities
• Channel tuning by Autosearch
• Background autosearch for channel update
• Electronic Programme Guide (EPG)
• Digital Text
• TV/Radio Modes
• IR Remote Control
• DVB Common Interface Slot (TopUp TV compliant)
• Software upgradeable by ‘off-air’ download
• VESA wall-mount compatible
• One month’s free access to Top Up TV