jprestondavid's Full Review: Universal Remote Control SL-9000 LCD Remote Contro...
Kudos!!
Bravo!! Bravo!! What a wonderful product! The MX-500 is truly a testament to American engineering. Finally...a remote that I can hand to the babysitter, and with about 2 minutes of training, she can run my (rather complex) home theater system without any problems (ditto for my wife, too ;^). This is the most versatile 10-device remote I've ever seen.
There are many remotes out there that have preprogrammed capabilities. Some also provide "learning" capabilities. I've used a few of them, and the typical configuration process for those remotes is akin to doing ones taxes - dreadfully complex. The MX-500 was recommended by a close friend, and am I ever thankful to that friend. This is an awesome product.
First Impression
I ordered the MX-500 online from Etronics.com. It arrived three days later. It was a bit larger than I expected, but it has a good solid feel in one hand. The body of the case is finished in a hard, rubberized, matte black finish. With the 4 included AAA batteries installed, it feels solid but not too heavy. The buttons are made of a hard plastic, not soft rubber like those found on most remotes. The text legends on the buttons appear to be covered with a clear coating, so they shouldn't wear off. The buttons have a positive tactile feel, so you know when you've pushed it.
The Display
The remote has an LCD display at the top that is about 1.5 inches wide and 2 inches tall. There are 10 programmable text "labels" on the display, 5 on each side, with a button beside each label. The LCD also has a label at the top and one at the bottom, neither of those have an associated button.
There is a backlight that illuminates the display and the entire keypad. It is activated by a button on the right side of the remote towards the top. The backlight is an electroluminescent display technology, which will significantly shorten battery life if used often. It can be configured to stay on for 5, 10 or 20 seconds after the button is pressed. It can also be shut off manually by pressing the button a second time. to be honest, in an average lit room, the backlight should never need to be used. If you watch movies in the dark, you may need it until you've memorized your key positions.
Below the display are 3 buttons, the "Page" button, the "Main" button and the "Fav" button. Essentially, these are used to operate the display mode and are incapable of generating IR codes.
The "Main" button is used, during normal operation, to display the main menu. The LCD labels on the main menu represent the different devices of your system. Pressing one of the soft buttons while displaying the main menu will cause the display to change to the menu for that device. For example, I have one of my main menu soft buttons labeled on the LCD as "DVD". When I press that soft button, it doesn't generate any IR code, but it simply changes the display to the page 1 of the DVD player controls. It also changes the rest of the control's functions to operate the DVD player. If I press the "Page" button, it will display page 2 of the DVD player's control function (there can be a maximum of 2 pages per device). Pressing the Page button again takes you back to page 1.
The display label at the top of the display always indicates what mode the remote is in; it displays "MAIN" when the main menu is being displayed, and it displays whatever label you have defined for your device soft keys when one of the device menus is displayed. The display label at the bottom of the display always indicates what mode the dedicated buttons are in. For example, if you are on the main menu, then you go to the DVD menu, then back to the main menu, the dedicated buttons remain in DVD mode because you haven't selected a new device to control yet. The top label, however, shows "MAIN", because the LCD display is displaying the main menu.
The Buttons
As mentioned above, there are 10 "soft" buttons that tie to displayed functions. Above those, on the right is a "System Off" button, and on the left a "Power" button. At the botton of the remote are 3 "M" buttons, labeled M1, M2 and M3. All of these buttons (System Off, Power, M1, M2, M3 and the 10 soft buttons) can each be programmed to operate a macro of up to 32 sequential functions.
Below the display are the Page, Main and Fav buttons discussed above. Below those are the familiar volume up/down and channel up/down rocker buttons, along with discrete MUTE and LAST CHANNEL buttons. As near as I can tell, the volume and channel buttons are the only ones that auto-repeat. None of the others seem to do that, and there's no configuration to change that behavior.
Below those is a joystick control with a 3/4 inch circular actuator. The joystick is essentially a 5-button control, one at each quadrant and one in the middle if pushed straight down (which, by the way, is somewhat tricky to do without pressing one of the quadrant buttons. That's my only negative comment on this product, and a relatively minor hindrance once you have used it for a few hours). Surrounding the joystick are the "transport" controls; play, ff, rew, pause, stop, rec, skip forward and skip backward. Several of those keys have alternate labels for DSS system use (guide, menu, exit, info). Below those are the numeric buttons, complete with "DIS" and "ENT" buttons at the bottom corners. Below those are the M1, M2 and M3 macro buttons described above.
Operation
Once programmed (I'll discuss how to program it below), this remote operates as most do. My OneForAll remote was kind of sluggish when a button was pressed. It seemed to take 1/4 to 1/2 of a second for it to generate the IR codes. The MX-500 doesn't suffer at all from that problem. Codes are generated instantly. As mentioned above, the soft buttons operate from the main menu to select device control "pages". If programmed properly, each of the soft buttons can also be programmed to execute a macro from the main page when pressed and held for 2 seconds. This is very powerful and intuitive for complex systems that have an A/V switch (like mine). I've programmed the macro for the DVD button to select the A/V switch for the DVD input, tune the TV to the S-Video input, then to leave the remote on the DVD page. I have similar macros set up for all of the other devices.
I have the "System OFF" button programmed with a macro that turns most everything on and off (it's the same sequence for my system). That leaves the "Power" button free for me to use as power for each device, without affecting the others. This is handy for my DVD player; it wants to play the disk in slot 1 as soon as it is turned on, and will play it forever until turned off. Therefore, I don't have the DVD power in the System OFF macro, I turn it on manually (using the Power button) if I'll be using the DVD player, after I've switch the system using the DVD macro.
The IR range on this remote is excellent. It works well even when the IR signal is bounced off of walls.
Programming
This is a preprogrammed remote, which means that there are oodles of device codes in a table in the back of the manual, several codes for each type of device from each supported manufacturer. To set up a device, you press and hold the "MAIN" and "ENT" keys for about 3 seconds to enter "programming" mode. All of the labels on the LCD change and each soft key will initiate a different programming mode. The programming mode functions include:
Prepr - Select the preprogrammed device codes
Edit - Edit text labels on the LCD
Learn - Record MX-100 button functions from other remotes
Fav - configure favorite channel list
Macro - Configure macros
Clone - Send entire program from one MX-500 to another
Bcklt - Set backlight timeout time
Punch - Punch through function, set Volume and/or transport buttons from one device to be used on another device.
To use the preprogrammed device codes, you simply look up the 3-digit codes from the tables in the back of the user manual, press the Prepr button, press the device button that you want to preprogram, then enter the numeric code using the numeric buttons. You use the POWER button to see if that code worked for your device. All of my equipment was supported in some fashion by the preprogrammed codes, but in most cases, I had to do some customizing. That's where the "learning" portion of the remote came into play.
My system includes a TV, an audio receiver/video switch, a DVD player, a VCR, a cassette tape player and Dish Network PVR system. I sat down with the MX-500 remote, and in less than an hour, I had it almost completely programmed to run my entire system. I've tweaked and rearranged a few things since then, but the basic program that I defined that night is what is running on the remote. Another testament to the MX-500...I have never opened the user's manual again since that first night. All of the programming functions are handled very intuitively, and the designers made excellent use of the LCD display and soft keys for programming.
I've written more than most people will want to read, so I'm not going to go into the step-by-step programming for every function, rather, I'll let you know what can be done, and you can take my word for it that it is pretty easy to set up.
Any "learned" function from any remote can be assigned to any of buttons - both soft and dedicated (except the Main, Page and Fav buttons). For those that may not know what "learning" remotes do, that means that the MX-500 will "watch" and record the IR code from your existing remote and assign that function to any key you choose.
You can program all of the LCD labels (up to 5 characters each) for the device names, 2 pages of device functions (up to 20 per device), and 5 pages of favorite channels.
In case you haven't realized yet, I really like this remote. It is the ultimate in customization!
Controls up to ten devices Preprogrammed for over 1,000 audio/video components Learns up to 530 commands via infrared from device remotes Send out mul...More at Amazon Marketplace
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