Unbelievably,
in the distant past, primitive humans had to get up and walk across the room
to change channels on their TVs. Then they invented fire — and remote controls.
Today, languishing in our high-tech La-Z-Boy recliners, we wonder how our ancestors
ever survived. From our sedentary positions, we also wonder why we seem to gain
an extra pound every weekend.
It’s almost impossible to imagine operating an A/V receiver, DVD player, or even a TV without a remote. Today’s home-entertainment products have so many features, and there are so many channels even on basic cable, that if you took away our remote controls, we’d have to spend our time channel-surfing or choosing favorite CD tracks crouched in front of the TV or electronics stack.
The trouble is, now that virtually every A/V component comes with a remote, even in a modest system there are too many of them! And if you’re lucky enough to grab the right one from the coffee table, you still might not be able to do what you want right away if it isn’t one you use frequently. Unlike computer keyboards and telephone numeric keypads, remote controls have no standard layout. So the power button, say, might be on the upper right corner, or the upper left, or somewhere else entirely.
| Fast Facts |
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ONKYO USR-5RF PROTON SRC-2010 RCA RCU1000B |
Enter the “super remote,” which consolidates many remotes into one, freeing up space on your coffee table for more Doritos. It also frees up brain cells since you’ll have to remember how to operate only a single remote instead of half a dozen or more. In addition, super remotes use “soft” (software-programmable) buttons that you can reconfigure based on the specific components you need to control, making the handset more intuitive than one of those all-in-one remotes with a generic button farm.
But is it really possible to merge many remotes into one and still have it be easy to use? Or are super remotes just confusing toys to play with during the boring parts of the movie? To answer that, I rounded up three of them at different price levels and started pressing buttons: Onkyo’s USR-5RF ($500), Proton’s SRC-2010 ($200), and RCA’s RCU1000B ($130).
All three remotes share some features. They all have backlit LCD touchscreens with reconfigurable soft-button displays. The backlighting is more than a convenience. It’s a necessity because you can’t operate them by feel in the dark — despite the name, touchscreens don’t provide tactile feedback the way physical buttons do. Frankly, some users just don’t like touchscreens, preferring to use a familiar remote by feel. Fortunately, all three of these super remotes also have hard buttons for controls like mute, channel, and volume that you’ll want to get to quickly without drilling down through menus.
All three can learn codes from other remotes by pointing them eye to eye, and the Onkyo and RCA are preprogrammed with codes for many popular products from other manufacturers. And all three can be programmed with “macro” commands so that a stream of codes — perhaps turning on an entire home theater system — will be transmitted when you push one button.
RCA RCU1000B
Just like me as a child, the RCU1000B is a real handful. Unlike me, it is
also massive and hefty. It is the least expensive ($130) of our trio, and its
design is fairly plain. Still, it has plenty of features. It can control up
to nine devices and is preprogrammed with codes for more than 200 brands (a
printed list is included). A photo sensor automatically turns on the touchscreen
backlighting in low-light conditions, but the hard buttons are not illuminated.
Soft keys can be added, deleted, or renamed. A timer can be set to activate
up to four events per day, each of which can be one command to a selected device,
like turning on the bedroom TV to wake you in the morning.
The touchscreen can display an array of up to 40 buttons, all the same size. The number of buttons and their functions depends on the mode you select, but the basic display architecture doesn’t change. The very simple labels and readouts work fine, but overall the display isn’t as attractive as those on the other remotes.
Operation is fairly straightforward. For example, to set a timer event, you hit the Setup button until “Setup a Timer?” appears. You select a device, such as a TV, and a function, such as on/off, then use the Channel buttons to select the time, and finally click OK. Macro programming lets you store up to 20 commands under each of nine macro buttons. In addition, you can program delays of up to 9 seconds within command sequences. An Audio Punch-Through feature lets the remote’s volume buttons control the volume on your A/V receiver or TV even if the remote is currently set to control another component, like your DVD player or satellite receiver.
You can change the soft-button labels or delete an unneeded button so it doesn’t appear on the touchscreen. However, because the LCD doesn’t use a dot matrix to construct its readouts the way the other two remotes do, you have at most three label choices for any individual button; for example, one button can be labeled Time, Info, or Count. On one hand, this limits flexibility, but on the other hand, it does enforce a degree of consistency — the power key has to be at the top right corner, and the numeric and cursor keys must always be in the same places no matter which component you’re controlling.
The RCA remote performed very well, if not flawlessly, and had a good set of features for its price. I was almost able to control some of my components simply by looking up their codes in the manual and punching them in. Why “almost”? Since the remote allows only three possible labels for each button, sometimes the labels didn’t fit the functions very well. And in some cases, the assigned button didn’t provide the correct function.
For other components, I had to turn to the learning feature. At first the handset would not learn any commands easily, needing several attempts before a new key worked correctly. Guessing that the high ambient light in the room was the problem, I dimmed the lights. After that, learning proceeded pretty well, with only an occasional need to rekey commands. This quirk is not unusual, but the RCU1000B was pickier than the other two in this group.
Because of its relatively low price, I assumed that the RCA remote’s memory capacity would be limited (the company does not specify how much it has), but it was enough for my purposes. It learned most of the codes used by four of my remotes with room to spare. The touchscreen was legible under most lighting conditions, but, as you’d expect, it became progressively harder to read as the light dimmed. When the room was completely dark, the backlighting came on automatically. I wish there was a way to adjust the sensor’s sensitivity so the lighting would kick in sooner.
The RCU1000B comes with a stylus, but its soft buttons are big enough for direct finger stabbing, and the glass seemed relatively forgiving of fingerprints. Though it doesn’t use flash memory, it will hold its contents long enough to let you change the batteries.
Proton SRC-2010
The Proton SRC-2010 is a sleek device with a lustrous finish that makes
it stand out. It can control 10 devices and provides 12 timers plus 12 macros,
each of which can send up to 25 commands. The touchscreen is customizable, and
a sensor measures the ambient light so it can automatically turn on backlighting
if needed. Unlike the RCA remote, the Proton lets you manually adjust the backlight’s
turn-on sensitivity and turn-off timing. The eight hard buttons grouped underneath
the LCD, assigned to the most frequently used controls, are also backlit.
The remote has two small jacks on its left side, one for DC power and the other for connecting it to a PC with the supplied RS-232 cable. The programming software, which Proton plans to make available free on its Web site, wasn’t up yet during our review of the remote.
The SRC-2010’s main menu shows a list of available devices, each of which can have its own set of menus, up to four “pages” long, with buttons specific to its operation. The displays are clean, in part because the touchscreen’s small size lets you fit only a small number of buttons on each page. The downside is that you might have to scroll through several pages to find the button you’re looking for. Buttons can be resized, relabeled, or deleted on either the main menu or the device menus, and buttons on the device menus can be labeled with either text or an icon. The setup menu lets you devise macros (with up to a 15-second delay between commands), set timers, enter learning mode, adjust the display contrast, and so on.
The SRC-2010 was both comprehensive and straightforward. I could set timers to activate daily, on a specific date, on a certain day of the week, on all weekdays, or even Monday through Saturday. Best of all, everything worked very intuitively. The Proton remote was definitely the easiest of the three to use.
One major shortcoming is that it has no preprogrammed commands in memory. All command codes must be learned from your previous remotes, which considerably increases the initial setup time. On the upside, the learning process was simple, if tedious. And, as on the RCA remote, the Proton’s learning eye is located in its tail, which let me place the two remotes head to tail instead of head to head, meaning that I could read the labels on both handsets simultaneously — smart. In the end, after relabeling some keys (using a tiny onscreen keyboard), adding some icons from the available selection, and moving soft buttons, I was able to create clean device menus and pages anyone would be able to use easily. It’s not something I’d want to do every day, but I found it more entertaining than standard TV fare.
I also checked out an earlier version of the SRC-2010 along with its PC software. The software was intended essentially to duplicate the remote’s functionality on a PC, but it also made it much more convenient to configure menus, create macros, create and move buttons, and the like. Better still, it let me back up all of my custom settings to my computer’s hard drive.
The optional SDS-2000DBC charging station ($110) is a sculpted base that holds the handset for recharging. Three AAA rechargeable nickel-metal-hydride (Ni-MH) batteries are included. Unfortunately, the remote can’t be used during recharging because it points up.
Onkyo USR-5RF
The USR-5RF’s wide body fills the palm of your hand. Although it’s the most
expensive of our three remotes, at least it has a nice sense of style. It even
has a chummy acronym, CHAD, for Custom Home Automation Device. Its 2-megabyte
memory allows extensive customization. And its touchscreen uses graphic icons
as well as dot-matrix labels to guide you. You can add, delete, and relabel
buttons or menus. Because the “pages” are customizable, you can put often-used
buttons on earlier pages and move less-used ones further back.
CHAD can associate learned commands with every device button, and you can create a “nearly unlimited” number of macros with up to 255 steps each. The total number of macros, timers, and devices it can control is limited only by memory. Macros and timer events can be grouped, with each group containing up to 25 macros or events. The remote is preprogrammed with codes for more than 500 brands.
The home menu lets you select the type of device you want to control, and each device has several menu pages. There are eight different operating modes, each with its own set of menus, that let you control devices, learn commands, assign labels and icons to buttons, and add components or macros. You can also delete a button, component, or macro, change the order of commands in a menu, tell the remote what gear you want it to control, and configure it to issue infrared (IR) or radio-frequency (RF) commands. There are two hard buttons, located below the LCD, that change function depending on the circumstance. To the right of the LCD are five dedicated hard buttons for channel and volume up/down and mute.
Onkyo’s CHAD worked well, with minimal quirks. Its menus are quite pleasing — the best looking of the three by far — but because many of them have large dark areas, they weren’t always as clear as simple text-on-white displays. Fortunately, a handy thumb control lets you adjust the LCD’s contrast for optimal viewing.
CHAD is also the most complex of the three remotes, and with so many menus and functions, it wasn’t always easy to operate. For example, Onkyo doesn’t supply a printed code list. The advantage is that you don’t have to go hunting for the manual when you need to program CHAD to operate a new piece of gear. The disadvantage is that accessing the right stored code set requires a lot of button pushing, which I found a bit cumbersome. CHAD was quick to learn from my dedicated remotes, however, and was indifferent to all but the brightest ambient lighting.
Befitting its flagship status, the Onkyo remote has a number of optional accessories. The BCC-5 docking station ($150) shown in the photo on page 66 recharges its batteries from a supplied AC adapter. I particularly like this charger because it lets you lay the remote flat and operate components with it even while it’s charging.
The CHADEdit software for Windows 95 and higher (free from Onkyo’s Web site) duplicates the remote’s setup functions in an easy-to-use PC environment. (The remote connects to a PC via a minijack that accepts the supplied RS-232 cable.) The editing tools let you customize the layout of the touchscreen, create macros, and anything else you can do using the remote’s own interface. In addition, you can change the typefaces of button labels or use your own custom bitmapped images as icons instead of labels (although that consumes a relatively large amount of memory). More important, you can use CHADEdit to load firmware updates into the remote.
An emulator in CHADEdit lets you test a new setup to make sure it performs as you want. For example, I tried out some selected IR codes by hooking up the remote and verifying that the components responded correctly. This software is a great feature, but I expect it will appeal only to power users. Then again, given its sophistication and price, CHAD itself might appeal mostly to power users. Too bad, because once it’s configured, it has user-friendly features that even neophytes and technophobes will appreciate.
For example, the handset can transmit RF signals with a range of about 66 feet. The optional RFR-5 ($150) can receive these RF commands and relay them to your A/V components via IR signals. I really like this option, because some of my gear is installed behind a louvered wooden door and can have trouble receiving IR commands. When I installed the RFR-5 behind the door and switched CHAD to its RF mode, the RFR-5 expertly received the radio signals and relay-controlled the components through their IR sensors. Slick.
Remote Roundup
All three of these remote controls have admirable qualities. Not surprisingly,
their levels of features and finesse are functions of their prices. Isn’t it
nice that in this one area of life you still get what you pay for?
The RCA RCU1000B is less polished than the two higher-price remotes, and the layout and labeling of its soft buttons made it a little more awkward to use. It’s also less customizable, but the options it does provide should be sufficient for a great many users. And its price is very attractive for a touchscreen remote.
The Proton SRC-2010 is elegant, flexible, and intuitive to use. Its display is attractive and highly legible. Even relatively complicated chores, like setting up macros, are easy to do, and its optional PC interface is a plus. On the downside, it isn’t preprogrammed with codes for popular brands and models, which increases setup time. In the end, though, this remote strikes a good balance between functionality and price.
The Onkyo CHAD is very impressive. Its extensive customizability and large memory capacity will let you spend hours fine-tuning every nuance of control over your home-entertainment empire. The powerful PC software can facilitate that process and give you even more choices to make. (If you really care what font your buttons are labeled in, this is the remote for you!) However, CHAD is complex and takes time to set up. It also costs as much as a full-featured DVD-Audio/Video player.
Whether you have a high-end home theater or a modest system with “only” a TV, cable box, DVD player, A/V receiver, VCR, and CD changer, a super remote might be the best “upgrade” you’ve made in a long time. Who needs the frustration of multiple remotes? Once you decide what features you need, let a remote like one of these three clear off your coffee table so you can enjoy the show.