Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Does is work? Yes. Does it look cool? Yeah, if you appreciate the similarity to a Starfleet "PADD" (and don't mind that it's half the size and weight of your laptop). Does it replace all your other remotes? Probably. Am I glad I bought it? Well, I suppose...
There are four basic problems in addition to the size. The first is that despite the perhaps-cool similarity to all those touch-screen manipulations you see on Star Trek, you're likely to wish you were pressing real buttons (with real tactile feedback) rather than a little part of the screen that says "power." And the real buttons that ARE present have no backlight.
The second major drawback isn't actually an issue with this universal remote as much as with the equipment we want it to control. Most home theater equipment just isn't ready to deal with the "macro" commands an AV3000 owner would likely want to program -- for example, turn on the amp, set it to DVD, turn on the DVD player, set it to wide-screen and set the volume to -5 dB, turn on the TV, wait 4 seconds for it to wake up then set it to Input #5 with wide screen mode, etc. The AV3000 allows you to do A LOT of this, but there's no way to program in discrete codes (e.g., turn ON, rather than toggle On/Off) unless you already have another remote that can transmit these. This means you end up programming functions for various but similar scenarios, such as play a DVD when the DVD player is already on, play a DVD when the TV is already on but the DVD is off, etc.
Third, the manual is just awful. It's pretty big, and there's an index (though the index fails to list a number of important topics), but the information is presented in a most inefficient and confusing manner. Owners of other Sony products will be familiar with this, unfortunately. If it weren't for the folks at remotecentral.com, I never would have learned a number of important procedures.
Finally, my unit (and others, from what I've read online) is extremely sensitive to lighting conditions when "learning" from another remote. When the lights are on, the unit gives a certain error message (five beeps), leading the user to look up the "five beeps" message in the manual. There you read a number of suggestions which don't apply, but nothing about turning off the lights. I spent at least four hours tracking this down. Ugh!
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