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Posted by fredman on 01/23/06 00:05
On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 15:42:06 -0800, fredman
<fbergnospamanio@comnospamcast.net> wrote:
>On 21 Jan 2006 09:47:59 -0800, eganders@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>>What is the best universal remote out there at a reasonable price?
>>
>>There are many universal remotes out there, but outside of turning on,
>>switching channels, playing & recording, most don't seem to control all
>>functions so you still have to keep the original remote to set
>>schedules for the VCR or the contrast, brightness, etc for TV's and so
>>on. Even if some of these are controllable by the remote, good luck in
>>finding where they are or remembering what button to push. If all the
>>buttons were on the remote, it would be the size of the family car.
>>Using the original remote to program the codes in the univeral remote
>>would be long and tedious to get all the functions from the old remote.
>>
>>My idea of a perfect remote would be one that would allow you to select
>>each device by a single button and have a touch screen that would be
>>setup to emulate all the device's functions. It would probably have to
>>be set up using a code like most do today, but I would think that
>>downloading the functions from the internet or an included CD would be
>>more practical since loading and maintaining all the functions you
>>would need would be very hard in the remote itself. I would think
>>doing the setup and generating the macros would best be done on a
>>computer also.
>>
>>Is there any remote out there that does this that does not cost as much
>>as a TV itself?
>You actually sound too lazy and stupid to handle a remote, but here
>goes:
Let me try that again without the unedited snide comments...
Something very close to what you want is the Sony AV-3xxx series that
do featue an LCD screen and does work much like you say but with
caveats...
First off, it does do the 2 main things that all good universals must
do; have a database of codes harboring common control setups for as
many brands/devices as it can hold, and also contains a learning
feature to program almost any button in any mode from any
(non-infrared) device. This insures that you can program your TV's
main controls easily but still program uncommon controls that you find
useful. The LCD is large and pretty thorough, but where Sony fell
down on this one is that they included the transport controls on the
LCD pad instead of dedicated hard buttons like vol up/down, etc. as
the LCD buttons are generally more difficult to read/press as the
regular buttons are for such a set of commonly used buttons. Other
than that each LCD screen features a bottom row of 4 programmable
buttons that you can also re-label (8 characters) as well as the other
'hard' buttons on the screen having 3 'pages' of std labels to fit.
Now that bad news is that my (older) model, AV-3000 had to be manually
programed, but I believe the lastest (AV-3100?) may be down-loadable
via PC/USB. I'm used to this control and, get this, this is the ONLY
remote on my coffee table, but IMO I'd still try to find and LCD model
that moves the transport controls onto dedicated buttons (along with
the circular menu buttons and of course vol. up/down and channell
up/down, etc), but with its many LCD functions (whose exhaustive
programmable options will probably not be found elsewhere) this one
comes very close. Good luck.
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