This has virtually nothing to recommend it at all.
The seating position is all wrong, with splayed feet, impossible-to-use foot straps, a jerky motion, needlessly complicated console and an irritating whining noise. It’s plasticky, wobbly and generally crap. If we could give it no stars, we would.

This air-resistance rower provides a cheaper alternative to the Concept 2 but isn’t quite as good.
You may save £150 but you’ll find that the draw is a bit more jerky and unnatural. The display console has lots of info on screen, including a useful stroke monitor, and there’s a good range of resistances, but you’ll probably end up wishing you’d spent the extra money and bought a Concept or a water rower.

Almost every gym in the country has this model, so they must be doing something right.
The main benefits are the adjustable resistance and the hi-tech console which does just about everything except wipe your brow. The only downside is that, because it’s an air-rower, the resistance doesn’t kick in until part of the way through the stroke and tails off too quickly at the end, so you’re never really working through your full range of motion.

If you have a designer living room, this is the rower for you – when you’re not using it you can stand it on its end and it looks like a wooden objet d’art.
When you are using it you can drift away on its smooth action and gentle swooshing noise. But if you’re looking for an intense workout, you’ll be disappointed. There’s only one resistance level and it’s quite low, so you’ll be rowing for ages before you feel like you’ve had a decent session.

This is a brute of a machine, and you won’t be able to hide it behind a pot plant when you’re not using it.
But it provides the smooth stroke and constant resistance of a water rower with the adjustability of an air rower. The adjustments aren’t precise – harder or easier, basically – and the monitor is a bit limited, but it has the best rowing action of any of the machines, and that’s what really counts.