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Little Timmy’s kicking the back seat, you’ve run out of Ritalin,
and you don’t want to waste any more tranquiliser darts on the urchin
of your discontent. What’s a parent to do? Why not strap one of these
Mustek LCD screens to the back of your headrest and sedate the chimp of
your loins with a DVD movie?
The quality of the picture is fairly bad compared to something like the Archos AV700,
but for £89 it’s hard to level much criticism at such an effective
infant passifier. It’s not like little Timmy is going to run a Dolby
reference DVD on the thing and complain the colour temperatures are a
few degrees off. But watching Ronin this morning demonstrated
heavy pixellation — even from a distance the screens won’t impress the
hardcore. It borders on the quality of video we saw in the days of the
Amiga.
Input options are fairly generous: there’s on-board
composite video, left-right audio and S-Video connectors. We couldn’t
eke a very impressive picture out of any of them. The S-Video
connection gives better contrast than the composite connector, but a
more jagged picture. Areas of high contrast rapidly become a mess of
jagged pixels — imagine really high levels of JPEG compression
and you’re in the right territory. There’s also something up with the
4:3/16:9 toggle switch. Our DVD played in the correct aspect ratio when
we carefully set the toggle between the two options — very odd.
Still,
that low price keeps nagging in our heads. You will, of course, need a
car DVD player to connect it to as well. Despite the poor picture
quality, basic objects and people in a movie can be transformed into
their rightful state by a powerful imagination — and children have no
shortage of that. Don’t think of it as a cheap LCD; it’s an
imagination exerciser for your childrens’ formative years. -CS
