Buffalo, LinkTheater

Bit of a weird one this. There’s no doubt that the LinkTheater’s price, which stands at about half that of its media streamer rivals, is an attractive selling point for what is, in many respects, a tidy piece of kit.

No HDMI, no problem?

The only problem is that positive price point comes at, well, a price. For many potential customers HD streaming will be very much on the agenda and a media streamer without HD support may well seem like a flying car that runs on leaded petrol.

That said, if you’re sticking with your standard-def telly for the time being, or if HD content isn’t a big deal to you, then that £100 selling price is going to seem pretty damn alluring.

The Linksys is a slip of a thing, but although it feels a little light and plasticky it’s perfectly well put together. Once hooked up via S-Video or Scart the clear, sharp menus will impress too.

Picture (im)perfect

Shame, though, that the same can’t be said of the video performance. This is where you’ll see the real cost of that lack of HDMI connection and come to understand just why the LinkTheater is so cheap – the amount of noise and pixilation in the picture was annoying and it wasn’t nearly as colourful as the video produced by HDMI-toting rivals.

It also seems to turn its nose up at larger AVI files even though it’ll greedily chow down on lots of smaller ones.

The LinkTheater also loses out to rivals in the lack of little extras like online news and weather content, and even its strong support for audio formats prevents it from making a really persuasive claim for your hard-earned.