I have only had this television now for 24 hours; not a lot of time so this is an on the spot review, why have I given this TV 5 stars? Well:
The TV - I plugged the TV in after attaching the aerial, I live in Wales so I cancelled the terrestrial set up and continued with the digital set up, the set up took about 6 or 7 minutes and when the picture came on I was very impressed, very good definition in standard mode, what it would be like in HD I will have to wait until either they broadcast HD on freeview, or I get an HD blueray DVD player. The sound quality is very good and the volume is adequate. When I switched off and later switched on again I would say the boot up time was quite long, about 25 - 30 seconds.
The EPG - The EPG pops up when you press the appropriate button and it works very well, a little sluggish as I noticed that when I stopped on the highlighted programme the cursor continued for two or three programmes and it had to be bought back, a minor thing. Now the beauty of this TV is that by popping a USB drive into the USB slot your EPG becomes a PVR, now don't get me wrong this is no Topfield or Humax but it is a PVR it records programs for you to play back, one thing I would have liked is the facility to press the pause button and then return to press play to continue but this is not possible, you need to press record first then press pause, once again only a small glitch. I did get a crash when formatting the pen drive but everything was OK after.
The recorded programs are stored as MPG files but not with the usual .mpg file extensions, I played with it on my computer and I found that VidepReDo will load the files and you can edit them and save them as .mpg files which you can then write to DVD or convert to Divx. Play back was also easy, you just press the button and you choose the My Videos folder and choose the program to play, one thing which I would like to see improved is the title of the stored program, this is stored with a date/time as the file name and there is no reference to the name of the recorded program, although playback was just as good as live TV.
You will need a set-top box if you want to watch one channel while you record another, a word to Bauer, Get rid of the terrestrial tuner and add another digital tuner now that would be great, no more boxes.
The DVD player - Well I can't say a great deal about this as it is a DVD player and that's it the quality of the picture on play back is excellent, what more could you want, I haven't tried it yet but it will play Divx files.
There are things that can be improved on this TV but at £200.00 for the 24" version and £169.99 for the 22" and £149.99 for the 19" you get a TV, DVD player and a PVR. No one can complain at that, and compared to our old portable we are in the cinema.
Bauer DUR18541 19-inch Widescreen HD Ready LCD TV DVD Combi with Freeview and USB PVRBauer DUR21641 22-inch Widescreen HD Ready LCD TV DVD Combi with Freeview and USB PVR