We are really in two minds about this gadget from Pinnacle, makers of some very clever things indeed.

The whole point of the Pinnacle Transfer is to let you transfer video from any video source, be it your TV, VHS player, older video cameras and even some game consoles, directly to a USB device, with minimal effort and without the need for a PC at all.

Using the Pinnacle Transfer is a no-brainer: you simply connect cables from your video device to the Pinnacle Transfer (you have the choice of s-video or composite video) and then it records to whatever USB storage device you choose to plug in.

The user interface is a series of lights that tell you when it’s recording and when it ’s done, simple and very effective. You have the choice of three quality settings: good, better and best, all of which are in MP4 format and is even automatically formatted for Sony PSP or iPod.

We really wanted to love this gadget, we wanted to say that it’s the best thing ever in the entire history of consumer electronics, but there are some things that let it down a bit. The MP4 encoding used for the Video Transfer is only compatible with Apple’s QuickTime installed.

What on Earth possessed Pinnacle to do this? Windows-based PCs don’t come standard with QuickTime, for one, and secondly QuickTime hijacks your system and wants you to update it every ten seconds. They really need to fix this. The other problem with the Video Transfer is that sometimes it just doesn’t work. We extensively tested it on a number of VHS tapes and on the odd occasion nothing at all happened.

But for convenience you really can’t beat the Pinnacle transfer and despite the bizarre choice of QuickTime as the player of choice you really do want one. RRP: R1899.