Customer Reviews

Sony LF-X11 12.1 inch Location Free Wireless TV

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First things first, it is absurdly expensive (the ONLY reason for 4 stars). Here is how I justified the expense:

This was a gift to my wife (early Christmas), and I wanted her to have a tv in the kitchen for when she is cooking/baking. This would involve getting a tv with an antenna, and we would get terrible reception (and none of her cable shows).

I also wanted to get her a tv for her scrapbooking room. That would require the same solution, tv with rabbit ears.

Then I looked at the slingbox type solutions, but read reviews about there being upload bandwidth restrictions for some internet providers, and it would require a notebook computer (which could be found cheaper than this Location Free product, but not as elegant a solution).

Instead of dealing with the hassle of any of those solutions, I simply bought this one product. I placed the base station in my office, split the cable TV signal before the modem so that one half goes to the station (and uses the built in cable tuner), and then connected a lan cable to my wireless router. And I was done.

Now we have a TV that we can take anywhere in the house or even outside (and theoretically anwhere in the world with a wifi connection, although we haven't tried it), and we didn't have to buy multiple tv sets, or deal with any of the hassle of wireless networks, snowy reception over antenna, etc.

This is a simple, beautifully efficient solution to our particular situation, although expensive.

Performance wise, we get great reception throughout our house (base station is on first floor, we get reception throughout the house (even on the 3rd floor) with very few dropped signals. When the tv does lose a signal, it automatically switches networks until it finds a good one. Now this will cause skips and jumps in your program for several seconds while it does this, which can be annoying, but it isn't a dealbreaker for me by any means.

Yes it does internet, email, and a photo gallery, neither of which we use. So if you are looking at this as a pseudo touchscreen notebook, don't. At its heart it is a TV, so don't expect too much above and beyond that.

The screen and sound are fantastic. I'm glad we went with the 12 inch version, as it allows us to share the tv in our office, with both of us being able to see it quite well.

They advertise the 'wide range' mode, which works as advertised. It can extend the range significantly, but it will make your picture and sound quality drop noticeably.

You can connect other video devices (VCR, DVD, etc) and use the remote IR blaster to control them, but we have yet to try that.

The onscreen remote is easy to use with the touch screen, although depending on the connection type, there may be a delay when changing channels.

In the end this is another fantastic Sony product, overpriced, but for our situation, worth every penny.

The other reviewers have pointed out the many good things about this product, so I will provide my impressions based on about 4 months of use.

First, although the base unit is about 6 feet from the TV, the signal is lost once or twice an hour on average. This causes the display to freeze for about 5 seconds (sometimes longer). Twice the base unit had to be turned off and then back on before the TV would resume operation.

Second, about every 2 weeks the TV will not turn on until the battery is removed and reinserted. It seems like there is an intermittent battery connection.

Third, the user interface is the worst I've ever seen. This TV badly needs a wireless remote. The channel must be changed using the touch screen, which would not be so bad if it worked well. When the screen is tapped once, a "remote" appears on the screen. I've been unable to figure out a technique which works when I touch/tap/press/push/bang on the appropriate number or button. There is a beep intended for feedback, but it works unreliably.

I'm giving up and buying a regular lcd TV.

I only use the portable TV functionality, not the mobile web, etc., etc. So this review rating is based exclusively on usage for that purpose.

I love the outdoors and this little TV lets the patio, porch, garage, woods, wherever, instantly become a great place to watch the game (check customer pics). You'll find all kinds of uses for it, like in the kitchen cooking or washing dishes, on the vanity watching ESPN in the morning or soaking in the tub and it's light w/a handle, so you won't mind carrying it around.

The screen is small at 12 in., but the picture quality is so good, you'll enjoy watching a whole game. It's bright, even at an angle and the battery life is 2.5 to 3 hours for me. Buy the craddle charger and a 2nd battery which will charge before the other runs out, so you can swap and keep watching. The sound is absolutely amazing for those little tiny speakers, it doesn't seem possible. I get range over 100 feet.

There isn't a remote for it, which is the one improvement I'd like to see, but the touch screen becomes a virtual remote with a "tap" and sends channel changes, menu, guide commands, etc. back to the cable/satellite box. It even works with my DVR. I have wireless phones and wireless network, but interference hasn't been a problem. I occassionally can get a "pause" in the picture, but it never approaches annoying.

Everyone who has watched this TV with me seems to want one and I'll buy another if anything happens to this one. That rates 5 stars from me. bhvideoproducts did a great job with my order and had copies of my receipt prep'd and ready for mailing in the rebate. Note, the actual rebate check was a small postcard and looked like junk mail, almost threw it out.

As all the other reviews have pointed out this unit is tremendiously over priced.

For what Sony is asking it should support HDTV and have better internet capabilities.

Sony's own support website for the Location Free TV is almost unviewable using their

own product and they don't even offer any updates. A notebook computer with a TV

tuner would be a far better and cheaper solution as it would have a larger and sharper

screen as well not be saddled with the Location Free TV's far from adequate Web browsing.

I'm unable to even check my Hotmail account or use some search engines and many

common websites due to incompatibilites with it's web browser and forget about viewing any

video or audio on the net. For $1200 I expect more from Sony or any manufacturer for that

matter.

That said it is a great idea and if you just want it to watch TV around the house it works well.

The battery life is a bit short if you want to go wireless; I get about 80-90 minutes per charge

unless you turn the screen brightness down so low you can hardly see the picture then you

can get about 3 hours. All in all, I would say it's a cool toy and your friends will be impressed

but $1200 for a 12" TV or $100 an inch is a bit steap for my taste.

This product completely delivers. I found it easy to set up and full of features. Far superior to the original LF-X1. Works well for both television viewing and web browsing.

Received the Sony yesterday. Within 20 min I had it receiving TV and had it linked up to our wireless home network -- all without opening a manual which is pretty good for a sixty-year-old! Reception is fabulous, email set up was a snap and it's really a treat. Now Sony needs to make it splash proof so I can use it near my hot tub. What a cool product! I've already forgotten what the price was!

PS: I mistakenly hit "purchase" twice and had two sent. Tech Depot took care of it immediately with no probs.

I am very satisfied with the LF-X11 TV. Set up was easy for E-mail and Wed Brousing. TV reception is excellent. I have had virtually no loss of signal. It is used in the kitchen and out on a screened in porch. I did not purchase this to be used for on the go so I am unable to comment on how these features work.

Cost is pricy, however, I believe Sony has a very good product.

I own two TiVos and use DirectTV. I find the old TiVo interface to DirectTV just wonderful and am completely happy with my purchase of the TiVos and the DirectTV service. I bought a Slingbox so that I could watch one of my TVs away from my home or in another room on my Laptop and I was happy with that, and later, just to play games and watch movies I also bought a PSP. The PSP has a built in player for their Locationfree product.

That is why I bought a LF-PK1 for the other TV. There is only one thing that this device does as well or better than the Slingbox: It plays on the PSP. The Slingbox does everything else better.

Folks, the human factors in the Slingbox are just sooo much better than the factors in the LocationFree's player that it is astounding. I'd gotten used to the TiVo's bean shaped remote. The Slingbox shows me an image of that bean shaped remote when I set it up - I have nothing to learn, the buttons are all in the same place. The PSP's player does not - it has a woefully incomplete setup and the PSP does not have the forward skip button mapped - perhaps the single button you push the most - nor does it have the numeric keypad mapped - so it is hard to tune to a channel - you have to go one at a time or use the guide a page at a time. The Slingbox automatically spaces out the stacked remote entries so that they all take effect - the LocationFree loses a lot of entries if you don't manually stack them and space them out yourself.

It is a fact of life that in order to get good quality from a setup like this (TCP over the Internet, locally or remotely) that you need to buffer about 30 seconds so that you have time for retransmission in case a packet is lost. Slingbox does this and then dumps the buffer when you press a remote key - and maintains a low delay until you have not entered a key for a couple seconds - this is called control mode. When you use the Slingbox's remote, it automatically shifts into "control" mode and then, when it leaves control mode it builds up delay again - doing do in a way that does not alter the pitch of the sound although it might slightly alter the tempo.

If you are gonna do a lot of remoting, you can shift into control mode manually. Control mode is jerky and not suitable for ordinary watching - but when you press a button you get feedback fast. Slingbox does this real well - and it just works - skipping commercials is not that painful. With the LocationFree, well, you have to use fast forward instead of 30 second skip because that button is simply not mapped - and then you have to wait for it to catch up so that you are guessing what happened some seconds ago. The difference in the human factors is like night and day. LocationFree uses a shorter buffer so it is less likely to get a retransmission through in time if a packet is lost in an attempt to get some responsiveness to the remote - and the result is that it performs neither function well. You get frequent picture loss/interruption when you are not using the dedicated Wi-Fi net on its own frequency (I have two APs and a 2.4 Gz phone and there are no local problems or glitches).

This is all esoteric and technical - so let me net it out. The Slingbox does things well. It does things you expect. It works. Smoothly. Some of this stuff is real hard to do and the compromises made by the Slingbox are almost always the ones that make things work smoothly. It does complex things without bothering you with them. I've explained control mode here and the reality is that you don't need to know that Slingbox even has a control mode - but if it didn't have it you'd miss it.

And Locationfree does not have it, and I miss it. If I'd never used a Slingbox it might not bother me as much, but I have been to the mountaintop.

When there are two ways to do something, the Slingbox people almost always pick the right way to do it, while the LocationFree people may or may not pick the right way to do things. When they fail to do the things properly, it affects your ability to use the functions of your device.

The ability for me to watch TV on the PSP is so valuable to me that I kept the locationfree device. I've used it at a motel that had wi-fi - I was able to use the PSP's browser to log in to the motel's wi-fi and then shift to the player.

If there was a player for Slingbox on the PSP (preferably one that would run from a memory stick) or the Nintendo DS (that would be a dream - TV on the top screen, bottom screen with a touchpad for the remote so that you could stylus the entrys), well, I'd gladly buy that cartridge, toss the LocationFree or sell it used and get a second Slingbox. I didn't want to buy a pocket PC - maybe I should have - and a second slingbox. I wanted to carry one thing for portable entertainment - the PSP with the mini-movies and games and RSS audio feeds that you could listen to live or download for later and the remote TV viewing seemed to be the do-it-all dream. But the human interface of controlling the TV remotely is a nightmare. I might not realise how bad it is - but I've used Slingbox's setup and Sony's setup, by comparison, is just poorly engineered and badly designed - it fails to meet expectations in almost all ways once they are set by Slingbox. Selecting a program to record remotely on the PSP was painful but possible - on the Slingbox it was fast and smooth. It took twice as long on the PSP simply because you could not trust the pre-entered stacked commands on the PSP but you could on the Slingbox player. On the Slingbox you could reliably go down three, over two and select then up one and select twice - more reliably than you could with a real remote in the same room.

If I wanted a bigger screen, I'd get a laptop, and a Slingbox. Since you can buy the basic laptop for about $600 these days and the slingbox for $140 and the Wi-Fi AP for $50-$75, well, it is hard for me to imagine that this 12.1" less functional device is worth more than you'd just pay for the laptop. Those people who had trouble with browsers? With Windows XP on a laptop, they have the ability to use any or all of the major browsers, tools they are already familiar with. Even if you have to drop a C note on your bud to set it up so that he will install an AV and a spyware scanner it is still a win because it all works better when you are done - and you are more likely to drop $30 for a case of good quality beer - or $40-$50 for a high-mid single malt. You can get a lot of tech work out of me for a bottle of decent single malt. :-)

Seriously - if you want to play TV on your PSP, then this will go with the locationfree player that you bought for that purpose - but you would probably still be ahead with a laptop and a LF-PK1 package that includes the license for one Windows XP based player (Slingbox allows an unlimited number of installs of the Windows XP based players). Try to avoid ever using a Slingbox though because you won't be happy anymore. If you need this size screen, and you know a savvy friend or you are savvy, a Linksys AP, a laptop with WiFi, and a Slingbox will work better and will hook up easier - you will need to set up proper security on the WiFi AP. And if you want the best function you can get for the price, well, the Slingbox seems to work better. By the way, if you just have a lot of money and want the best possible device that is most flexible, then the Slingbox wins again. You can get a player for the Pocket PC for a Slingbox and that takes the niche that the PSP fills - the handheld device - while causing you to have to carry another device - I was already carrying a cell with a browser and e-mail and, well, the PSP's browser is only for emergencies since entering text on the browser in the PSP - on a phone keyboard without T9 is too painful to use for e-mail and such.

A Nintendo DS player on a cartridge would be a killer app - which would eliminate one of the major niches that the PSP has. It would need some flash and even a basic browser to get through hotel WiFi setups and probably need to be set up with a bunch of flash so that people could download newer versions of players, and image maps for the remote control images so that the Slingbox people could maintain their high quality. But that does not exist, so you need locationfree to play on your PSP. But to play on a 12 inch overpriced screen at your house....it just makes no sense.

The idea is good even beyond your imagination. Very easy to set up. You will have more fun if you set it up with internet.

The major disappointment is that I find ONE dead red pixel on the monitor. Call Sony for the resolution and my answer is that the moniter is not defect base on their guide line. No exchange, however, I can send it back to repair on MY OWN COST (not cover by the 90 days warranty!!!!!!). They even say the price will be double up to make it 100% dead pixel free. And the statemnet inprinted on the owner menu, you can download it from Sony's website.

This is very disappointed. A dead pixel on the monitor is defect. I can buy a 17" LCD monitor with less money and 100% no dead pixel. If you plan to buy one of this. My advice is checking the monitor before you pick it up if you can. Good luck, because will cost you same amount as buy a new one.