WHEN Barry Gordon watches a DVD on his 10-foot diagonal-measurement home theater screen, he’s not simply watching TV; he’s watching a major production.
Hank Hagquist uses a Logitech Harmony One remote instead of five individual units for his home theater.
The Logitech Harmony One remote.
The lights dim, the stereo belts out “Hooray for Hollywood” and each video and audio component switches on automatically. All Mr. Gordon has to do is take his seat, having accomplished all this with a single push of one finger.
Mr. Gordon, a retired director of systems engineering for Northrop Grumman and a home-theater enthusiast and technophile, uses a universal remote control, the Pronto TSU9600 from Philips, to run the whole show. Not only does it control every aspect of his home theater — and all the other TVs in the house — but by pushing a few buttons, he can start the air-conditioning, his whole-house audio system and any one of the 11 networked computers in his home in Merritt Island, Fla.
But simplicity does not necessarily come cheap. With a price that matches the price of some TVs — $800 — the Pronto is overkill for most people. Besides that, Philips recommends professional installation.
Still, the popularity of universal remotes points to a problem — and marketing opportunity — as people create their own home theaters and home automation systems: remote control proliferation.
It is not unusual to be deluged with remotes, given all the boxes hooked up to today’s TV. Owning a DVD player, an old VCR, a cable box, a TiVo, a sound system and perhaps a new Blu-ray player can easily mean having half a dozen remotes on the coffee table — or more likely, scattered across the room and lost behind seat cushions and under stacks of magazines.
According to research conducted by Logitech, makers of the Harmony brand of universal remote controls, in the last five years the number of remotes in the average household has increased to 3.3, from 2.7.
But what universal remotes give in terms of reducing clutter, they often take away with increasing complexity. Simple tasks often take more concentration. Here are a number of new remotes that can do as much as the $800 device, though often not quite as elegantly.
LOGITECH HARMONY 1000 Equipped with an L.C.D. touch screen, this tabletop unit, with a street price of $330, gets its commands through the Harmony Web site. Once you create an account online, the site asks for the make and model of your components, and which ones need to be turned on for a particular task. When the remote is connected to the PC via a U.S.B. cable, all essential commands are downloaded to the unit.
With the Harmony, as with some other models, you don’t turn on components; rather, you set up activities. For example, telling the remote you want to watch a DVD automatically turns on the DVD, the amplifier and the TV.
Unfortunately, except for a few buttons, most activities are controlled using the touch screen, which buries many of the controls under several layers of menus and often makes them less convenient than the original remotes.
LOGITECH HARMONY ONE At about two-thirds the street price of the Harmony 1000, the hand-held Harmony One combines a touch screen and a wide assortment of buttons. The remote is easy to hold, with intuitive keys.
“We spent 20,000 hours on research,” said Ashish Arora, Harmony’s manager for remotes. “We went into homes, gave them 20 to 30 different remotes, and deconstructed everything, including the distance between buttons.”
Channel logos can also be added to the Harmony One’s screen, making channel changing a simple matter of touching the icon. Unfortunately, the device comes only with an assortment of Fox logos, and the programming software refers users to an incorrect site to download others.
But the Harmony telephone support is good. On several occasions, calls were answered promptly with no waiting time. And a tech support person immediately provided a good site to find all those elusive channel logos (iconharmony.com/watchtv/index.html).
PHILIPS PRESTIGO SRU8015 The Philips unit uses a mechanical scroll wheel that borrows its concept from the circular touch pad on Apple’s iPod. The scroll wheel turns to navigate among component brands during setup and to select activities once the unit is configured.
You don’t need to know the model numbers of the various devices to set up the Philips; you simply select the brand of the component, and the remote automatically tries a series of configurations until it hits on the right one.
The company chose a scroll wheel because “80 million people can’t be wrong,” said Andre Lalande, a Philips marketing manager.