5. Performance And Ergonomics, Continued

Paging through lists of songs or videos took 4 to 5 seconds as the H140 slowly assembled a screen full of file names on-the-fly from its hard disk. This was also often the case as we waited for a selected submenu to show up. In terms of speed, it felt a lot like choosing options from a satellite or cable TV box using a remote: "slow as molasses in winter" comes to mind. And, as with TV boxes, we frequently found ourselves pressing a button or moving the joystick a second time because we suspected the device didn't get the first press or move.

Once we located the file we wanted, we were able to play sound and videos with ease from the H140's hard drive. Sound quality through the H140's small monaural speaker left a lot to be desired; it was somewhat better through the supplied stereo earbuds, but still far from high fidelity. Finally, we connected a pair of JVC HA-NC100 headphones to the unit, which improved sound quality significantly.

Sending the PVR's video and audio output to a TV proved easy after we found instructions for directing video to an external device in a FAQ on Mustek's website - the information was not in the Getting Started guide or the manual. Recording TV or DVD programs from our DVD player/recorder equipped TiVo unit was also easy. Mustek included several movies with our test unit, the quality of which was pretty good. Videos we recorded with the H140 in highest quality mode did not quite match that quality.

Neither the included movies nor our recorded videos played very well on a 27" CRT TV screen, nor on a carefully calibrated 21" Sony PC display monitor. They were dark and, given that their resolution was optimized for the H140's small screen, the videos were less than sharp and not artifact-free when viewed on the big screens.