It's German-engineered, a vision in brushed aluminium and it's in Harrods, but it's not as expensive as you think...
Luxury German AV brand Loewe has launched its latest TV range and it's 4K across the board. It's currently being previewed exclusively at Harrods along with the more high-end Connect range. Initial impressions are strong with beautiful, "affordable premium" design (very Apple), strong visuals on upscaled Blu-ray and decent sound - Loewe is really pushing the audio as a killer feature, but it's hard to draw too many conclusions in Harrods tech hall.
It's called the 'Art TV' and other futuristic features Loewe would like you to know about include "super-fast channel changing" and "brilliantly realistic picture quality". A startup time of "8-14 seconds" is promised - hopefully more towards the quicker end of that scale.
Available in 40, 48 and 55-inch sizes, the Art TV's USP is clearly its aesthetic appeal but it does have a number of smart features too.
With dual Freeview tuners, it'll stream channels to your tablet if you can't be in the living room, it'll record to a USB drive, and crucially for an Ultra HD TV it packs HDMI 2.0 and HEVC/H.265 decoding, which will allow the streaming of 4K Netflix and the watching of 4K Blu-ray at 60fps when 4K BDs are eventually a thing.
Despite the name and the looks though, the Art TV actually comes in as the cheapest in Loewe's range, costing £1,299 for the 40-inch, £1,699 for the 48 and £2,099 for the 55. The rather tasteful stand shown here adds another £300.
