It's a small black box measuring about 6 x 2 x 6 inches. There is a small LED and some writing on the front. At the back are the sockets for the various connectors. It interprets the data from a video CD and displays the picture on your monitor or TV. There is a free video CD (Four Weddings And A Funeral), a remote control unit and a small manual. All for the £200 asking price.
What you actually get is a compact black box which is almost featureless and would not look out of place next to your video equipment, which is intentional because it's a free standing unit that only needs the data fed to it in order to work. However, this data must be fed in through a SCSI-2 lead though, so unless your TV is close to your computer setup, you're unlikely to want to keep moving your CD player, thereby reducing the overall usefulness of the unit a little. If this isn't a problem for you then it's nothing to worry about.
When it's connected to the Compaq double speed drive (as detailed above) all the CDs I tried played well. Speech, music and sound are all perfect, no jumps or stutters. No skipping and very little loss of picture quality usually associated with MPEG. The only one that didn't look quite right was a David Bowie CD called 'The Video Collection'. This one seemed to stop prematurely at the end of some tracks, and when there was very fast movement you could notice the blockiness creep in, maybe it's because that disk was made a few years ago and the others are newer!
Anyway, at the back of the box are two SCSI-2 sockets, one for input the other as a through port. Then there is a Scart socket for output to a TV or monitor, plus a socket for the power supply. A rather interesting addition to these sockets is an input for a computer with Genlock, allowing you to overlay any graphics directly over the video CD images.
The question is, with the limited quantity of video CD titles available, do you have a use for this kind of equipment? Well, I can't really answer that for you but consider this...
With the specifications of PCs getting higher and higher, many are capable of playing video CDs already. So, with the hardware becoming more and more common, wont video CD titles become more commmon as well? Assume that they almost certainly will, then decide how much further behind you want the Amiga to become! It's quite expensive for most of us at the moment but prices should come down as volume of sales goes up.
Score - 89%