Hands-on Experience
The form factor of a remote is one of the essentials for me, besides
ease of use. The Philips
RC9800i
did catch dust on my desk because it is a tablet style device and is not usable to channel hop. This
thing is for people who like to place the remote on the table and
interact with it there. It looks cool, but it is not
convenient. I also did not like the time consuming setup wizard,
where you get asked to press several keys until the remote confirms
the right remote codes. With the
SRU9600 Philips changed all that.
This remote is rather long, but it still lies good in my hand and I
can lean back in my sofa and control my home theater universe. I was
impressed how quickly I could setup my devices.
|
|
|
The backlight LCD Touch screen
makes the SRU9600 shine. |
The SRU9600 uses a straight forward process to add a device. To
configure my TV, I first select TV with the click wheel from the
list. Next I choose the brand. The Philips SRU9600 has 1,100 brands
in its database. I have tried it with a cheap Daewoo TV and the
remote has this brand in its list. Now the remote tries to find the
right device. For that I need to switch on the TV and then hold the
OK button until the TV switches off. While I hold the OK button the
remote cycles through available codes. I my case the TV switched off
with the first code. I release the OK button and that was it. The
remote is now able to control my TV with all functions.
One important tip is to think about which devices you use in
sequence. you cannot change the order of the devices after you
configured them on the click wheel. What I mean her is that you
usually use your TV first and then the cable box. If you programmed
your DVD player after the TV then you always have to scroll over the
DVD component to reach the Cable Tuner.
Besides the Daewoo TV, I have a Panasonic digital DVD recorder,
Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector,
Yamaha
YSP-1000 Sound projector and an old Denon Hi-Fi system. The 2
year old Panasonic PVR/DVD recorder worked from the Database as well
as the Yamaha YSP-1000 and the old Denon. Only the Sanyo PLV-Z4 did
not get recognized. For this one I had to learn the functions one by
one. Philips calls this fixing keys. This works like with most
universal remotes. You just place the remotes head to head and press
the keys you want to learn on each remote in learning mode.
|
|
|
Cool packaging. Because you can demo the remote before buying, the batteries are
already installed. |
The backlit LCD display shows different
layouts for the different components. The layouts are mostly
appropriate and have in most case to pages you can toggle between.
To activate the LCD display when it is in standby I have to touch
it. I changed the backlight timeout from 3 to 10sec, because it
bothered me while fast forward on my PVR. To stop I always had to
'double click'. First touch to activate the screen and second touch
to push the stop button.
The click wheel interface works well for me. Scrolling through the
devices is fast and comfortable. After a while I memorized the
sequence of components and got faster selecting them.
Besides controlling individual
components the SRU9600 also supports activities, which is a series
of remote commands. This is useful if you want to push one button
and switch on or off all components to watch a DVD on the projector.
Another convenient feature for some
might be the copy volume function. This feature adjusts the volume
of connected components to match the volume setting of the TV or
Amplifier. I do not use it currently on my setup.