The Oggle Freeview box may be cheap but that's not a bad thing if you don't expect to get all the features you would from a Sony top end Freeview unit. You get 2 scart outputs but no digital sound output or any other form of connectivity but that's plenty to hook the Oggle up to our TV and to start viewing. The menu system is useable if not the best piece of interfacing we've ever seen, most controls seem intuitive but features such as being able to pull up a full channel list with a single click seem missing. There is a full EPG lurking under the guide button which gives 7 days of any channel listed on Freeview and allows channels to be viewed side by side, it's a bit sluggish to update but no slower than our Pace unit but not as fast as the Sony VTX-D800U.

The Oggle box itself is a basic almost possibly plain looking set-top box, it is only lifted by the Oggle logo which has more than hint of the Google logo about it. However we mustn't be rude as most boxes that sit under the telly aren't exactly beauty contest winners and this silver effort looks ok. The remote however is an uninspiring lump of plastic which is very large and feels cheap and as this is the bit you have contact with it does remind you have only paid £30 every time you pick it up.

When testing a Freeview box the 2 main issues are quality of image and sound, plus reliability. Our tests of the Oggle Freeview box showed that the picture quality was acceptable, there were no more compression artefacts than on our other units and when the compression starts to break down the Oggle manages to smooth / blur the effect which makes them more acceptable rather than highlight them as some units do. Having said that we did find the image a little soft in general and also lacking in the full vibrant colour which is often contained in some channels like TMF. Audio was good as we expected, we tested both TV audio and also the Freeview radio stations which sounded fine both through our TV and HiFi speakers, we did note that the overall level was low and that we relied on the TV's amplification to get the output of the Oggle up to a suitable level.

Over the course of a week the Oggle unit did not have any real stability issues and there was no need to reboot it, which is more than can be said for the temperamental Pace unit. Lip sync seemed spot on unlike a Panasonic unit we tested and our only problem was with the speed of Red button services which seemed to take an age to load. This makes the BBCi service slower than analogue teletext which was rather amusing considering we are told that all things digital are faster / better than the analogue systems.

As I sat watching TV during a spell of high pressure  the weather man started apologising for the poor TV reception I though to myself what's he on about? and that's because I'd long ago switched to Freeview (DTT) and gained the reliability of a digital signal. Now at £30 the Oggle Freeview box means that there really is no excuse for watching a shimmying hazy half French half BBC picture. For a basic box with scart output and good picture quality that doesn't need a reboot everyday we'd have to say the Oggle is a safe bet.

Published - 02/02/2006

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