Review: Bluedelta Smart-Scart-Plus peripheral

With all the interesting A/V gadgets out there, it’s easy to build up a rats nest of cables and leads behind your TV.

Then there's all the fun of re-plugging and re-switching, each time you want to watch a DVD, watch satellite television or play a games console.

Thankfully Bluedelta's Smart-Scart-Plus will help to make sense of the clutter.

It looks simple enough, a black plastic block with seven scart sockets and assorted coaxial and S-Video ones. Plug-in its little mains power supply, though, and a lot of your home cinema problems will be over.

The first socket is the output to your TV, and the others are various inputs, ranked from one to eight – that's six Scart and two S-Video.

The clever thing is the ranking: plug a Freeview, satellite ore cable receiver into socket 1, a DVD player or PVR into sockets two and three, with a video recorder and other gadgetry taking the higher numbered connectors.

The two S-Video connections are designed for a games console and a video camera.

The Smart-Scart-Plus defaults to the lowest number input socket with a signal on it, automatically blanking any lower-numbered sockets.

So by default you will be connected to your Freeview, satellite or cable receiver. However, if you start a DVD movie or play a VHS tape, this will automatically take precedence, without having to switch off or disable devices connected to lower-numbered sockets.

Not only this, but a technology called Smart-Record enables you to record from any scart input to any recorder plugged into a scart output from the block, at the same time as playing a video game connected to one of the S-Video co nnectors.

There are twin audio outputs, to so you can feed out to a stereo or multi-channel (up to 5.1) sound system. It all works pretty transparently, making it a real good send to use.

The only snags we could see were the price - even though there's a good deal of switching design gone into this device - and there's no high-definition (HD) support - which won't please owners of the latest games consoles or receivers like Sky HD.

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