The picture on the Cam 1 Plus is razor sharp. Vibrant colour definitions without the slightest sign of bleeding. Snapshots and recordings taken via SCART with direct SVHS converter were the sharpest yet in our tests. Audio is also perfect, crisp and well balanced with full, rich palette kicking in with Dolby Digital mode. If only more channels wanted to provide DD to us hungry audiophiles…

OSD banner is simple, kept in one colour tone with channel and time displayed to the left, present EPG entry in the upper middle and icons informing of special channel features appearing to the right. Both lock on and channel info fetch is very fast. Present program title is also fetched directly from the channel data, independent from the rest of the EPG.

Another thing worth mentioning is the banner's support for really long names. Where other boxes slice down present program entry Cam 1 Plus takes a nice turn and simply wraps the product of over verbose EPG putter to a line below.

Detailed channel status and signal info is invoked from the remote just above scrolling keys. Once again it's quite fast with very quick refresh rate on the signal info dB scale. With all the information, including teletext PIDs and band served without a sweat the only weakness we could find was that Cam 1 Plus strangely omits the Bouquet readings. Not a biggy though.

More details of a present event can be easily viewed on the screen as well as from the same row of buttons.

Well-designed retrieval of DVB data also means no further problems with extra soundtracks or subtitle features. Changing soundtracks is just as easy as everything above, with proper popup to it. The choice of language and also subtitles defaults to the first language available and is stored per session.

The subtitling gave us a little more work to do. We've noticed that subs on our favourite test movie channels get cut after a number of letters in a row. Knowing that Canal+ loves testing their inventions on live organisms we could presume this was down to their yet another newly discovered way of breaking DVB standards more than to the design of the box. Moving to another channel the text-chopping problem disappeared but we found weird characters all over the place. And just when we thought we finally caught Cam 1 Plus on a bug in software a new version of OS was released. After flashing the box and returning to troublesome channels we found all subtitles in order and peace with our needs. Whether the previous experience was provider's fault or the box will remain a mystery…

…you don't sa…	No compr‰nde	That's more like it!