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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed design, but a good value nevertheless, November 13, 2002
The general buzz among remote controls enthusists is that this Sony is a piece of junk and that the Home Theater Master MX-500 by Universal Remote Controls is a far superior execution of the same basic idea. It may well be that the MX-500 is better. However, if you're like me, the fact that the Sony VL1000 is roughly half the price of the MX-500 right now ought to make you take a closer look at the Sony before you shell out all that extra cash.I've been using the Sony VL1000 for a few weeks now and while I understand some of the complaints that have been made, I still think that for the price, it's a pretty good remote. A few impressions: It is quite powerful. The VL1000 is capable of doing just about anything that you could reasonably want a remote to do, at least in this general price range. The timer is particularly cool as are the channel macros. Many complain that the digital display is tough to read. The display IS somewhat difficult to read, but after adjusting the contrast it's at least legible in most lighting conditions. In direct light or very dim light with the backlight I would go so far as to say that it is quite clear and distinct. It seems to be moderate light hitting the panel indirectly that causes the most readability problems due to glare. If you are farsighted, I would stay away from this remote. If not, you shouldn't have too much trouble. By far the worst thing about the remote is the set up. Programing takes a long time and is unnecessarily tedious, mostly due to the fact that labeling the custom buttons involves scrolling through about 100 different characters one by one until you reach the particular letter or symbol you are looking for. Add to this the fact that empty buttons are labeled "*********" by default rather than just being blank and you are looking at hours of labeling to get the thing to look decent (although after a while you learn exactly how long to hold down the scroll button to scroll from "*" to " "). It probably took me 20 minutes to teach it all my other remotes and set up my macros and then 2 hours to label all the custom buttons. They should have copied the standard cell phone design and assigned a small number of characters to each number button on the remote (i.e. 1 = A,B,C; 2 = D,E,F; etc). Also relating to set-up, it is a long annoying process to alter the preset order that components appear in. There is a "copy" feature, but it writes over the component that you are copying to, which is a problem if you just want to change the order of components rather than get rid of some of them. On the other hand, unless you like to tinker endlessly with your remote settings, you should only have to go through this frustrating process once. A relatively small price to pay considering the pricetag. The joystick on the VL1000 is really super. Probably the best thing about the remote. The fact that the top buttons don't line up correctly with the screen is a bit annoying, but it's hard to see how they could have designed it differently without starting over from scratch. I'm already getting pretty used to it. You can also work around it somewhat by putting the buttons you use the most in the bottom two slots on the panel, since these do more or less line up with the corresponding buttons. I didn't find the manual to be any more poorly written than average for electronic equipment. That is not to say that it is well-written by any stretch of the imagination, but I have definitely seen much worse. It's not great in terms of button layout--one handed use is difficult when using the custom buttons at the top, especially if you have small thumbs like me. But this was obvious before I bought it and I'm not sure that the MX-500 is any better. Having the channel and volume buttons at the bottom would be fine except that the number buttons are quite a bit further up the panel. Just using the numbers is fine as is just using the channel/vol buttons. It's going back and forth between numbers and channel/volume buttons that proves rather awkward. Overall, the VL1000 is a pretty good value given the low price. It may not be a good remote for you if you like to fiddle with the setup a lot or if your eyesight isn't great, but for most users it is more than adequate. While I can understand choosing the MX-500 over the Sony if your budget allows, it totally escapes me why someone would buy a VL900 over the VL1000 as some advocate.
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