Pioneer’s LV190 is a curious PC. It’s reminiscent of both Fujitsu’s monster, 32in Media Center LCD TV/PC and HP’s excellent TouchSmart PC in that it’s essentially a 19in widescreen LCD with a PC built into the back of it. However, unlike HP, there’s no touch screen.
The screen is desk height with an adjustable prop at the back. This immediately makes it difficult to raise it to eye level meaning virtually everyone will be looking down while they work – very bad for posture. However, a wall mount option can be bought if you wish to use it as a Media Center TV.
The 1440 x 900 screen itself is generally crisp and clear, but icons at the bottom of the screen did lose clarity because of poor vertical viewing angles – not helped by the sloping position. Still, movies didn’t suffer lag, and colour performance was acceptable. The speakers, however, are very good: more akin to a portable TV than standard computer monitor offerings. Both
music and video sounded great.
Other peripherals include a wireless Microsoft keyboard and mouse. The former isn’t the most responsive though and combinations of keys didn’t always register which is poor for gaming.
The hardware inside is a mixture of PC and notebook technologies. The motherboard is a G965 model, custom made by Clevo (who provides the chassis), and there’s a nifty Core 2 Duo E6600 processor onboard. This, along with 1GB of RAM and two full-sized 320GB hard disks (running in RAID0) managed a score of 1.05 in our benchmarks – more than enough to power this system, but slow considering the specification.
A 256MB GeForce GO 7600 graphics card is included. In our Call of Duty test, at low settings, it scored a modest 32fps meaning you’ll have to drop resolution and settings to play most games. The lack of DirectX 10 compatibility rules out playing new releases at their best.
Because of the sealed nature of the unit expandability is severely limited. There’s space for two more RAM sticks and we fully recommend adding the $99 TV tuner to the package should you buy it. There are four USB ports, mini FireWire, an eSATA port, SD/MMC card reader, an ExpressCard/54 slot, four audio jacks and Gigabit Ethernet. Composite, S-Video and RCA audio in connectors are present. A notebook-style WiFi and BlueTooth card is also included and a 1.3 megapixel webcam is embedded at the top of the screen and a notebook dual-layer DVD writer is included.
It feels like a cheap, generic version of the TouchSmart: both are designed to be PC/TV-based media hubs. But HP’s model is so much better thanks to its touch screen and companion SmartCentre software. We could forgive this if the LV190 was significantly cheaper but a similar Pioneer spec actually costs more than the HP - leaving the DreamVision high and dry.
